> Your losses will be large

HVDC has been sending multiple GW at 3% loss per 1000km for decades.

> and a terrorist or adversarial attack would easily take out our overly concentrated grid.

What conceivable terrorist attack could put an appreciable dent in hundreds of square miles of solar panels or wind turbines spread out over hundreds of thousands of square miles of area, yet would not be much worse if targeted against a populated area?

By contrast, consider the Russian drone and missile attacks against Ukrainian power plants. Those same missiles and drones would destroy a few hundred solar panels or a few wind turbines, resulting in only a tiny fraction of their impact against thermal plants.

The large area taken up by wind and solar make them much less vulnerable to attack than traditional power plants.

> Have we finally seen a peak in ICE?

Here's another data source showing ICE sales peaked 5 years ago:
> "The acceleration in EV adoption means that combustion vehicle sales peaked globally in 2017 and are now in permanent decline. By 2025 passenger ICE sales are 19% below their 2017 peak."

> The person you responded to was talking about tyre size as an indicator of vehicle size, and you started talking about people not replacing tyres that are worn

You're responding to the person who started this thread.

Look at the usernames -- both u/neverbeaten. The one talking about not replacing tyres was u/compounding; different person.

This is the original commenter clarifying your misunderstanding of their original comment.

> Why don't you guys or women watch a certain documentary called"Planet Of The Humans"

Probably because it's full of bad information:
> "In their new YouTube documentary “Planet of the Humans,” director Jeff Gibbs and producer Michael Moore argue for splitting the two sides. Their misleading, outdated, and scientifically sophomoric dismissal of renewable energy is perhaps the most dangerous form of climate denial, eroding support for renewable energy as a critical climate solution."

The article goes into substantial and specific detail, but suffice it to say that the documentary you keep citing is not a good source of information about this topic, and I would strongly recommend you check what it's told you against other sources. If you're up for reading somewhat detailed articles, Carbon Brief is generally a reliable source which cites its sources well.

If you're not up for reading detailed information about the topic that's fine, but recognize that your knowledge of the topic will necessarily be rather limited, and -- if it's mostly from a widely-criticized movie -- will often be outright wrong.

> Here is a better comparison of the current policies

Did you not notice that they're referencing exactly the same analysis that I did in my original comment? They're linking to Climate Action Tracker, just like I did.

So...congratulations on coming full circle and finally agreeing with the references provided in my original comment, I guess.

While you're there, it may be instructive for you to note that while "current policies" result in 2.7C of warming, "current policies" as of 2018 would have resulted in 3.3C of warming, so "current policies" is very much a moving -- improving -- target.

Indeed, it's likely they'll put out a new analysis after COP27. Every previous major iteration has shown that estimated warming has declined -- for "current policies" as well as for scenarios taking into account pledges -- so it will be interesting to see if that continues to be the case after COP27 and if so how much. We'll see.

> Yes, if we can dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions, we will have less greenhouse gas emissions.

And as a result ~1.8C of warming.

I'm glad we now agree on the main content of my comment.

> They also state that it isn’t a likely scenario as countries over promised and are under delivering

Science requires specifics -- what specifically do they say that you interpret as that?

In general, the sources I've referenced do not say what actions are or are not probable, as they correctly recognize that predicting future human behavior is very hard and not their forte. What those sources do do is examine different scenarios, and analyze what would happen if each of the different scenarios were to occur.

Note that the IPCC and IEA in particular very explicitly call out that they are not saying which scenarios are more or less likely, only what will happen if those scenarios occur.

> There is no popular support for drastic cuts of fossil fuels in those countries.

Yes, which is why the key change is making clean energy cheaper than fossil energy.

Costs have dropped 10x for solar since 2010 (and 3x for wind), and as a result renewables are virtually all net new global power generation. Clean energy isn't suddenly booming because people have suddenly decided to self-sacrifice; it's suddenly booming because it's cheaper.

It's the same for moving away from oil; due largely to a 10x decline in the cost of batteries since 2010, EVs are projected to be a majority of the global car market by 2034 or even 2030 as reality races ahead of predictions.

That is what's driving the transition to clean energy and the subsequent emissions reductions -- economics.

Are national pledges questionable? They're not nothing, but I largely agree with you that they're shaky. The underlying technological and economic changes, though, are what is allowing those pledges to be kept with minimal sacrifice, and those technological and economic changes are the important drivers to keep an eye on.

> Did you even read that Nature Paper? It does not support your conclusion.

Yes, I did read the Nature paper. Did you? What part of it do you feel disagrees with what I've said?

From the paper's Abstract:
> "Here we show that warming can be kept just below 2 degrees Celsius if all conditional and unconditional pledges are implemented in full and on time."

That's largely equivalent to the "all announced pledges" scenario at Climate Action Tracker (which, as I noted, should not be surprising, as there is overlap between the two groups of authors).

> Actually none of your links support your conclusions as realistic.

Do you have specific examples of where you believe I've mischaracterized specific references?

Or does what I've said simply feel wrong?

Without specifics, you're not making much of an argument here.

> Fewer, Nature. Fewer

Are they using fewer types of toxic chemicals, or less volume of toxic chemicals? If the latter, Nature is right.

> I call BS on your citations.

Interesting. Would you care to critique the methodology of the Nature paper associated with the 1.8C estimate I cited?

Of note is that the first author of that paper is one of the drafting authors of the IPCC WGI report, so their scientific credentials are a little more than can reasonably be dismissed via "I call BS".

The other source is the International Energy Agency, set up by the OECD (rich countries) to provide data on energy in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis. They certainly have their flaws, one of the major ones is how they consistently underestimate the growth of renewable energy. Indeed, their scenarios from 5 years ago were far more pessimistic than their scenarios today, indicating that their overly-conservative bias has continued at least up until recently.

I know the data these sources are giving you feels wrong, but how the data feels is of limited value in a scientific discussion.

> a total anthropogenic CO2 emission (including the cement carbonation sink) of 10.9 ± 0.8 GtC yr−1 (40.0 ± 2.9 GtCO2).

Emissions are projected to peak around 2025 (source) and fall 15% by 2030 (source). Those figures would suggest ~33GtC through 2025 + ~51GtC through 2030, or another 84GtC used from the carbon budgets by 2030.

That would leave carbon budgets at 21GtC (1.5C), 116GtC (1.7C), and 251GtC (2.0C). At 9.5GtC/yr, that would be 2.2, 12, or 27 years of static emissions.

If emissions continued to decline linearly at that rate -- speculative, for sure -- they would go to zero around 2060, resulting in an additional 141GtC emissions and ~1.8C of warming (25GtC above the 1.7C budget but 110GtC below the 2.0C budget). Interestingly, 1.8C is also the current estimate if all announced targets are met.

All in all, this broadly confirms the evidence we've previously seen. The window of plausible climate futures is narrowing fairly substantially -- and generally towards the low end of what had been considered likely warming, which is great -- but 1.5C does not seem realistic anymore. 1.8C does have a few lines of evidence pointing towards it being realistic with significant effort, so it might be useful to think of that as the baseline target and spend some time explaining why every fraction of a degree better (or worse) than that will significantly reduce (increase) extreme weather, drought, famine, and suffering.

> I think you've misunderstood the vast majority of what you've read.

If you would care to quote and discuss specific examples, I would be happy to dig into those. It is always possible that I've misunderstood.

Without anything specific to discuss, though, it's hard to meaningfully address your comment. Vague generalities don't provide much in the way of substance.

> I do want to add that your criticism of using RH as a proxy is not included in my comments here...that is pretty reasonable.

That's...80% of my comment.

80% of the rest was pointing out that they're making unsupported claims based on their survey (awareness vs. practice).

So, yes, there was indeed a small amount of editorializing based on my impressions having read through the paper. I believe I clearly marked those as such, so I don't think that's unreasonable. (As always, though, I could be wrong on that, and am open to specific arguments to the contrary.)

The methods used in this paper are pretty far from realistic. Worse, they keep making claims about things they do not have the data to show.

From "Results":
> "Even though not specifically related to virus transmission through water vapor and droplets32,33, measuring the relative humidity (RH) transmittance can be a simple, rapid and worst case method for testing the performance degradation of FFRs."

i.e., they use as a proxy for mask effectiveness against particles and droplets whether the relative humidity inside it changed over the course of an hour (Fig.2). That's highly questionable, as even with 100% droplet blocking one would expect water molecules to evaporate from the captured droplets and migrate to the other side of the mask (since molecules are far below filtration size).

That...doesn't tell us much of anything useful.

Moreover, it's in direct contrast to the evidence we have of healthcare professionals wearing masks for multiple hours with strong protection against infection. This is not a good proxy measure.

They appear to be trying hard to conflate this useless measure with a useful measure. From "Discussion":
> "According to our RH transmittance tests, the fast and significant drop in humid air filtering capability demonstrates a rapid functional degradation not specifically related to bioaerosols transmission."

i.e., "our method tells us nothing about protection against viruses, but we'll claim it shows "rapid functional degradation" in order to sound like we've shown masks are bad".

That's actively misleading.

They similarly overclaim in their conclusion to the discussion:
> "As a conclusion we can say that, while it is evident and commonly accepted that wearing a face mask is very important for reducing the virus spread, especially in circumstances where proper ventilation and social distancing cannot be guaranteed, our study underlines that wearing a face mask is really beneficial only if it is used correctly."

Their data does not support that claim.

Their data shows that relative humidity increases after a short time; it does not show that viral transferrence increases after a short time. They keep trying to conflate those two things, but their data does not support that conflation.

Ug - there's an obnoxious amount of conflation and overclaiming in this paper.

Hmm - the paper seems to be injecting a certain amount of bias into the text. From "Discussion":
> "The collected survey data highlight the lack of awareness of the basic principles of single-use face masks"

They do not have the data to make this claim.

In particular, none of the survey questions they asked give them information about awareness of mask use, only actual practice of mask use. It's entirely possible (and likely) that survey respondents were aware that single-use masks are single-use, but chose to re-use them for various reasons (convenience, cost, etc.).

Similarly, from later in "Discussion":
> "This confirms that government rules do not automatically lead to a proper face masks usage by the general population."

Is that a claim anyone has ever made? It reads as a low-effort complaint about government regulation.

All indications are that the paper was written with a specific conclusion in mind rather than as a dispassionate examination of the data.

> it’s the result of western countries imposing strict environmental standards in their own countries while supporting exploitative manufacturing in China.

I'm not sure if you realize quite how much you're infantilizing China and acting as if it has no agency.

You're writing as if China's actions are of course the doing of the West...with the subtext being that China is somewhow not capable of making its own choices. That's...astonishingly racist. China -- and Chinese people -- have far more agency than you're suggesting.

Does that mean we should criticize them for using as much coal as the rest of the world put together? No, because it would be pointless to do so -- like every other major nation, China responds mostly to internal needs, not to harsh words from a rabble of outsiders.

So what do we do?

First, give up the racist delusion that the West is the world's puppetmasters.
Second, engage with nations like China to find parts of the problem where we agree and can work together for mutual benefit.
Third, keep installing clean tech as fast as possible, both to directly reduce our own emissions and to entice others to join by lowering their costs.

Interestingly, China's the one leading the world on point 3, not the West.

> I wager if they work at 6.3 GW they would use up the stored energy quite quickly.

Yes -- they're typically 4h systems.

As a point of interest, 600GWh is modeled to be enough for 90% clean electricity for the entire US (sec 3.2, p.16), supporting 70% of electricity coming from wind+solar (p.4). That's 150GW of 4h systems, vs 15GW planned installation from 2021 to 2024, so a significant increase but not unreasonably so, especially with the rate of growth of battery manufacturing.

> The batteries can take care of the peaks while nuclear ramps up/down with load following.

That would absolutely be effective (and nuclear can absolutely load-follow if designed for it), but nuclear is being added at <1/10th the scale of renewables and will take 20 years to scale up, so simple logistics have already baked in wind+solar+batteries as the drivers of decarbonizing our energy supply.

It doesn't even really matter at this point if nuclear is better and cheaper; it's just not getting built in anywhere near large enough amounts to play a meaningful role in new decarbonization before about 2040.

(That being said, I do think the US and EU should start building nuclear again so they'll have an additional source of clean energy available to deploy at scale in the mid-century. It may end up not being needed, but better to have it available and not need it than to need it and not have it available.)

> The simple and sad fact is battery technology isn’t improving that much

That is not accurate.

Compared to a decade ago batteries have 5x the energy density and 1/9th the cost while charging 20x as fast (17kW in 2010 vs. 350kW today).

> while people like to pretend it’s all renewable batteries aren’t. In fact the minerals are quite finite and China is the source for a lot of them.

That is not accurate.

The largest global source of lithium is Australia, which produces more of it than all other nations combined.

China is the major source of rare earth elements, but lithium batteries use no rare earth elements.

Some lithium battery chemistries use cobalt, but LFP does not, and LFP is expected to reach almost 50% market share in the next few years. It's also very well suited to grid storage, as its pros (longer cycle lifespan, greater thermal stability) are significant while its cons (lower energy density) are mostly irrelevant for grid storage.

> In reality we should be building nuclear power plants and investing in Hydrogen Fuel Cells

Neither one of those are being produced at a scale large enough to drive decarbonization over the next 10-20 years.

Like it or not, the only clean technologies being produced at a large enough scale to meaningfully drive decarbonization of global energy supply over the next 10-20 years are wind, solar, and (lithium) batteries. There are other excellent technologies that may have an impact later (notably next-gen nuclear), but those are being installed at <1/10th the scale and scaling those up will take 20 years, by which time most of the decarbonization work will have already taken place.

For a task as large as overhauling the world's energy supply, scaling up manufacturing capacity is a huge component of making it happen. That scaling has already taken place for wind and solar -- they will be 120% of new electricity added between now and 2030 -- and is taking place right now for batteries and EVs. That scaling has not taken place for nuclear ot hydrogen fuel cells, so the real-world logistical requirements of scaling mean that those technologies will not contribute significantly to decarbonization until around 2040.

It doesn't even matter if they're better techologies, it's just a matter of the sheer time it takes to build out supply chains, manufacturing capacity, and other logistics.

> Battery technology on utility scale has barely budged for years

That is not accurate -- annual installations grew by 4x in just the last 2 years (6.3GW vs. 1.6GW globally), in large part due to the 89% cost reduction in pack prices.

Total grid storage solution prices haven't fallen by as much due to the other components (and seem to have risen this year due to supply chain issues), but in general battery grid storage has been changing rapidly in both cost and (especially) scale.

> Decrease in emissions is not really possible as of now is it? CO2 is not going anywhere. We would have to start "harvesting" it.

I think you're confusing a decrease in emissions with a decrease in levels.

CO2 emissions are the amount the world pumps out every year. If we replaced all coal-fired power with non-emitting power, our emissions would fall dramatically.

CO2 levels are the fraction of the atmosphere that is CO2 molecules. If we replaced all coal-fired power with non-emitting power, but kept using gas-fired power and ICE vehicles, CO2 levels would still increase.

CO2 emissions are highly likely to start decreasing this decade. That means CO2 levels will still be increasing, but -- for the first time -- more slowly. That change -- yearly emissions flipping from increasing to decreasing -- is a necessary step towards net zero emissions.

> % decrease in emissions is incredibly flawed metric. If you have 1000 imaginary units of CO2 and increase it by 100 then it was increase of 10%. Next year you have 1100. You now increase it by 105. Increase of only 9.5%. So growth slowed down right?

I think you're confusing a decrease in emissions with a decrease in growth of emissions.

Fundamentally:

• CO2 levels drive warming.
• Emissions are the first derivative of CO2 levels.
• Growth of emissions are the second derivative of CO2 levels.

If you imagine a curve, the second derivative declining and falling below zero is a necessary precondition for the first derivative to decline and fall below zero, which is itself a necessary precondition for the curve to start dropping to lower values.

Growth of emissions is the second derivative; it has been declining for years, and will drop below zero around 2025.
Emissions is the first derivative; it still start declining around 2025, and will drop below zero if/when we reach net zero.
CO2 level is the curve itself; it will not start declining until after net zero.

Clear?

Renewables and EVs prevented about 70% of the CO2 emissions increase:
> "The rise in global CO2 emissions this year would be much larger – more than tripling to reach close to 1 billion tonnes – were it not for the major deployments of renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles (EVs) around the world."

Given that renewables have been growing at 25%/yr and EVs at 50%/yr, a 70% reduction is likely to turn into a >100% reduction (i.e., a decrease in emissions) within just a few years.

Note that 2022's rise of 300Mt will leave energy-related emissions about 0.7% below their 2018 peak, as emissions in 2021 were still 500Mt below 2018's level. There's a reasonable chance that will be exceeded in 2023, but also some chance it will not. Either way, it looks like energy-related emissions -- 3/4 of the total -- will end up being basically flat from 2018 to about 2025, and then will enter a permanent decline.

Roughly speaking, then, the world hit peak energy-related emissions about 4 years ago, will continue on its current plateau for another couple years, and then will see ongoing emissions declines. That decline will drive a peak and decline of total emissions as well, which as a result will likely slowly increase until 2025 or so before also declining. Fairly big news.

> When you pay rent, your landlord pays income tax on that rent you pay. A homeowner pays no tax on the imputed rental income of the house

Sure, but the homeowner also does not get to deduct operating expenses or depreciation in the way a landlord does.

Looking only at imputed rent as untaxed income without looking at building maintenance as offsetting expenses is fundamentally misrepresenting the comparison between homeowners and landlord+renter pairs.

> It's down to under 18% of home owners now who can actually take the deduction and lower their taxes.

Yup, and even that 18% are seeing a much smaller benefit than before.

Previously, an expensive ($1.5M) house could increase overall deductions by $40k+:

• • $40k/yr for mortgage interest
• • $15k/yr for real estate tax
• • $13k for standard deduction
    Net: +$42k

Now, even an expensive house like that might get 1/10th the benefit from itemizing:

• • $25k/yr for mortgage interest (capped)
• • $5k for real estate tax ($5k space already filled by state income tax)
• • $26k for standard deduction
    Net: +$4k

The tax changes in 2018 more-or-less killed the mortgage interest deduction in the USA. (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.)

> > 1¢/kWh
> >
> > pennies per watt
>
> One of these is bullshit.

No; in fact, if you work through the math, you'll see that these are saying essentially the same thing.

There are 8,760 hours in a year; average capacity factor for US solar is ~25%, so that's around 2,000Wh = 2kWh per watt per year. At a typical discount rate, the installation will be expected to pay for itself with 5-10 years of output, or 10-20kWh. At 1¢/kWh, that's only 10-20¢/W which must also include operations&maintenance, meaning an energy cost of 1¢/kWh requires an installation cost in the range of 5-10¢/W.

Similarly, you can run the math from the other direction; if you start with "pennies per watt", you get however many "pennies" that is divided by 5-10kWh (halved to account for O&M), or somewhere in the ballpark of 1¢/kWh.

> here we are in 2022 - with a projected 30% global growth this year

Actual generation in 1H2022 shows that projection is realistic. Comparing to actual 2021 generation, we see wind is up over 20% YOY and solar is up over 25%.

Estimating the actual growth rate is a little tricky, as we have full-year 2021 vs the increase between 1H2021 and 1H2022, but a little napkin math gives ~22% increase pace for wind and ~30% pace for solar. Weighting those by their share of generation gives a 25% increase from 2021 to 2022 in energy generated, meaning wind+solar will increase from 10% of global electricity generation in 2021 to about 12.5% of global electricity generation in 2022.

That's a surprisingly rapid rate of conversion, and it's even more astonishing that it's still growing 25% yearly. That growth rate can't continue forever, of course, but it's continued longer than I think most people would have guessed. That growth rate falling to 0 over the next 5 years (+20% then +15%, etc.) is a fairly pessimistic trajectory, but even that would result in 60% growth, meaning ~4% of global electricity generation being converted to clean power annually. As fossil fuels currently provide 60% of electricity, that pace would see fossil fuels squeezed down to a small share (20%) by 2035.

> I don't think they are really delaying anything, when the major US automakers are all in on EV's its a lost cause.

I largely agree -- EVs started getting mainstream when batteries started getting cheap. No amount of online astroturfing is going to change the fact that EVs will be cheaper than ICEs in most major markets within a few years (source), or the fact that wind and especially solar are increasingly cheaper than fossil fuel power generation.

The economic forces propelling our transition to clean energy are almost inevitable at this point.

Their delaying tactics -- doomism and hopelessness -- are causing significant psychological distress to vast numbers of people, especially young people. As a result, even if their propaganda is not causing any delay in the energy transition it's still worth combatting for the mental health benefits alone.

> I am realizing the oil companies are seeding the public with thoughts that we can't change, so why bother.

You're right -- that is the new face of climate change denial::
> "Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.
>
> What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair. But “too late” narratives are invariably based on a misunderstanding of science."

Their efforts are very much just a delaying tactic, though, as the economics have shifted decisively in favor of clean energy, with renewables now virtually all net new electricity generation worldwide and EVs projected to be a majority of the global car market by 2034 or even 2030.

Still, each year of delay is that much more cumulative emissions and warming, so pushing to accomplish the transition to clean energy sooner rather than later will still have tangible benefits.

Interesting.

Have you tried hiking shoes? My experience has been that they tend to wear better than athletic shoes.

I also tend to scuff my feet more while running than while walking, which I suspect contributes to the significantly higher rate of wear while running.

> 4 miles a day will absolutely chew through shoes.

It really doesn't.

My smartwatch tells me I average 6-7 miles a day, so probably around 4 miles with shoes on, and the newest of my three pairs of shoes is about 5 years old.

The only pair showing significant wear is the only one of the three I also use for running; the two walking/hiking shoes have fairly minimal tread loss.

> Someone that has time to walk 4 flippin' miles because they want to

They're not only counting walks for pleasure; walking to the kitchen to get a glass of water racks up steps as well.

If you get a step counting app on your phone, you may be surprised how quickly steps accumulate from just living your life.