Costs of Climate Change Denial Start to Roll In

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Wind turbines take far more land, concrete and steel than conventional or nuclear thermal plants of the same power (All RE has far lower energy and power densities than fossil/nuclear), and both concrete and steel production are heavily dependent on fossil fuels, which is why it's so critical to develop cleaner methods for producing both that can be massively scaled up. At the moment, we're just starting to develop the necessary technologies.

David Mackay's "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" has some ballpark numbers:
To create 48 kWh per day of offshore wind per person in the UK would require 60 million tons of concrete and steel – one ton per person. Annual
world steel production is about 1200 million tons, which is 0.2 tons per
person in the world. During the second world war, American shipyards
built 2751 Liberty ships, each containing 7000 tons of steel – that’s a total
of 19 million tons of steel, or 0.1 tons per American. So the building of 60
million tons of wind turbines is not off the scale of achievability; but don’t
kid yourself into thinking that it’s easy. Making this many windmills is as
big a feat as building the Liberty ships.

For comparison, to make 48 kWh per day of nuclear power per person
in the UK would require 8 million tons of steel and 0.14 million tons of
concrete. We can also compare the 60 million tons of offshore wind hardware
that we’re trying to imagine with the existing fossil-fuel hardware
already sitting in and around the North Sea (figure 10.4). In 1997, 200
installations and 7000 km of pipelines in the UK waters of the North Sea
contained 8 million tons of steel and concrete. The newly built Langeled
gas pipeline from Norway to Britain, which will convey gas with a power
of 25 GW (10 kWh/d/p), used another 1 million tons of steel and 1 million
tons of concrete (figure 10.5).

https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml

Elsewhere in the book he shows the embodied energy and CO2 costs of various construction materials.

I've read similar comparisons of relative amounts of steel and concrete required for various types of renewable electricity generators vs. fossil and nuclear plants by Vaclav Smil (one or more of his books: "Still the Iron Age: Iron and Steel in the Modern World"; "Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses"; and "Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives, 2nd Edition" has the details) and others, and they all reach the same conclusions. IIRR Smil does cradle to grave analyses.
 
Building wind turbines is hard work and not for the faint of heart. Maintaining them is no easy task either.
Fuel burning plants are easy by comparison.
 
LeftieBiker said:
We tend to 'look passed' existing massive infrastructure and think only about how hard it can be to build it from scratch.

Smil's "Energy Transitions" (earlier post) shows historical time-frames, total primary energy replaced and costs.
 
Domestic terrorists running loose with chainsaws trying to cut down power lines.
Then I get an add for stihl chain saws on youtube.
https://youtu.be/DP_dyBfdnz8
Definitely looks like the first time that person ever used a chainsaw.
 
Oilpan4 said:
Building wind turbines is hard work and not for the faint of heart. Maintaining them is no easy task either.
Fuel burning plants are easy by comparison.
Ultimately it is the cost of the electricity produced if you include all costs of construction, fueling and maintenance. And I believe coal is a loser and NG is falling behind. Now add in air pollution and there is no contest.
 
According to Rasmussen 41% of likely voters believe that climate change is making fires worse. 54% believe it's human and other causes making them fires worse.
Queen Nancy would say "we have the votes and that's all that matters".
 
Oilpan4 said:
According to Rasmussen 41% of likely voters believe that climate change is making fires worse. 54% believe it's human and other causes making them fires worse.
Queen Nancy would say "we have the votes and that's all that matters".
Truth isn't decided by voting. Nor by the barrel of a gun. Nor by the most annoying trolling.

Experts broadly agree now that decades of fire suppression actually made the risk of forest fires worse. This policy increased fuel loads in the nation’s forests that under different circumstances would have been thinned by flames.
While the entire world has warmed as a result of increased carbon emissions, the Pacific Coast has seen some of the most dramatic temperature increases. The region has warmed 2 degrees F since 1900, and the past several summers in the region have been some of the hottest on record.
A third factor is that development has expanded into once-wild areas, putting more people and property in harm’s way.
Addressing just part of this problem will produce incomplete solutions. Rather, I believe a multipronged strategy is what’s needed. One element is improving forest management to make these lands less primed to burn. The other is reducing carbon emissions and reining in global temperatures – the only way to moderate climate conditions that make fires larger and more likely.

https://theconversation.com/climate-change-and-forest-management-have-both-fueled-todays-epic-western-wildfires-146247
 
Very twilight zone like.
Putting out fires makes them worse, the only way to make them less intense is have more fires.
It only took 50 years to figure it out.
 
Oilpan4 said:
Very twilight zone like.
Putting out fires makes them worse, the only way to make them less intense is have more fires.
It only took 50 years to figure it out.
Oddly, I remember people saying this 50 years ago. Of course, now it's national news.

Wonder how long it will take to figure out climate change?
 
GCC:
Study finds stabilizing warming at 1.5 deg C would result in economic hit through 2100; benefits accrue by 2300

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2020/10/20201012-dice.html


A new study by a team from San Jose State University and Stanford University has found that—even under heightened damage estimates—the additional mitigation costs of limiting global warming to 1.5 deg. C (relative to 2.0 deg. C) are higher than the additional avoided damages this century under most parameter combinations considered. An open-access paper on their work appears in the journal PLoS ONE

Specifically, the researchers found that under their central parameter values, limiting global warming to 1.5 deg. C results in a net loss of gross world product of roughly US$40 trillion relative to 2 deg. C and achieving either 1.5 deg.C or 2.0 deg. C requires a net sacrifice of gross world product, relative to a no-mitigation case, though 2100 with a 3%/year discount rate.

They found that the benefits of more stringent mitigation accumulate over time; the calculations indicate that stabilizing warming at 1.5 deg. C or 2.0 deg. C by 2100 would eventually confer net benefits of thousands of trillions of dollars in gross world product by 2300. . . .

Brown and Saunders note that efforts to mitigate global warming are often justified through calculations of the economic damages that may occur absent mitigation. Although the earliest damage estimates were speculative, more recent studies have provided empirical estimates of damages on economic growth that accumulate over time and result in larger damages than those estimated previously.

These damage estimates suggest that limiting global warming this century to 1.5 deg. C avoids tens of trillions of 2010 US dollars in damage to gross world product relative to limiting global warming to 2.0 deg. C. However, in order to estimate the net effect on gross world product, mitigation costs associated with decarbonizing the world’s energy systems must be subtracted from the benefits of avoided damages, the authors argue. . . . .


Assuming their analysis is correct, ISTM the question boils down to how much does the current generation owe to future ones, and how many generations out?
 
GRA said:
A new study by a team from San Jose State University and Stanford University has found that—even under heightened damage estimates—the additional mitigation costs of limiting global warming to 1.5 deg. C (relative to 2.0 deg. C) are higher than the additional avoided damages this century under most parameter combinations considered. An open-access paper on their work appears in the journal PLoS ONE

Specifically, the researchers found that under their central parameter values, limiting global warming to 1.5 deg. C results in a net loss of gross world product of roughly US$40 trillion relative to 2 deg. C and achieving either 1.5 deg.C or 2.0 deg. C requires a net sacrifice of gross world product, relative to a no-mitigation case, though 2100 with a 3%/year discount rate.


Assuming their analysis is correct, ISTM the question boils down to how much does the current generation owe to future ones, and how many generations out?

Both 1.5 C warming (world is already at 1C) and 2C warming are unlikely to be the limits to warming. 3.5C is more likely. And as the cost isn't linear, we should pay more attention to worse case.

bau_future_warming_med.jpg


4.5C_Sensitivity.jpg
 
I doubt that holding it to 1.5 C is realistic at this point albeit useful as a goal, and we'll probably be lucky to hold it to 2 C, barring some massive removal by sucking of atmospheric CO2, at massive energy and financial cost.
 
Tonight's episode of PBS' "Nova" is titled "Can We Cool the Planet?", and covers various approaches such as atmospheric CCS, aerosol injection into the troposphere and/or stratosphere, trees, compost, synfuels, etc.

I've been reading about many of these for years, but this goes into more detail about the current state of things. Unfortunately, these techniques are at best at the early, small scale Dem/Val stage, and many of them are still in or barely out of the lab. Direct air carbon capture takes a huge amount of energy. Still, as the program makes clear, just stopping our emissions won't be enough, we'll also need to reduce the existing amount of GHGs in the atmosphere.
 
Well I got 9.45kw solar panels, it snowed and was overcast yesterday. Made 0.1kwh for the whole day.
So solar power isn't going to cut it for the large swath of country that gets snow.
 
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