Cheaper in what sense? It is an intermittent source of energy, it can't be baseload.

And while I'm not saying I can predict the next 20 years of innovation, breakthroughs in battery storage seem like a pipedream at this point. 8-10 years ago everything was "10 years away", now we're here and meh, not much to show and we're still running on 85-90% fossil fuels.

Obviously traditional nuclear plants are more expensive but unless there is some innovation in nuclear, I don't see how we curtail emissions in any real way.

The Medical-Industrial Complex's slogan with respect to cancer has been 'A cure is right around the corner' for several decades.

It's hard to get donations from folks year and after year without making bogus promises to them.

It's the Medical-Industrial Complex version of President Hoover's "prosperity is just around the corner."

Overall the electricity provided by wind and solar has gotten cheaper than the energy provided by coal, oil, and now even natural gas.

And it can be baseload. Even if there were insufficient battery storage facilities, as soon as wind and/or solar were unable to produce energy, plants like natural gas would be able to step in and provide electricity during the cloudy windless days. Which could be predicted in advance.

The irony is that as baseload energy sources coal plants and to some extent natural gas as well have failed too. In the freezing temperatures in some southern states they all failed. The natural gas lines that were supposed to supply during those times failed. As did the coal plants.

No it hasn't. Some forms of cancer HAVE been cured. Others have 10 year survival rates of close to 0. Curing cancer (which is really hundreds of diseases with thousands of treatments) is hard enough without you weighing in with nonsense conspiracy theories without knowing the basics beyond buzz words like medical industrial complex.

So why is it <10% of the energy mix like 15 years after massive gov't subsidies for it? I'm not trying to be a wise ass either but it hasn't been scaled out at all and that is after having taken out most of the low hanging fruit (solar in the sun belt, wind in the great plains)

Will renewables ever be able to be the main electricity component? Seems like that isn't a remotely viable solution for climate change

7-8 years ago, I was told on this board and by friends that by now it would be a significantly greater source of power than it is. I guess that is just life though, people tend to get too optimistic about innovations they want to see work. Self driving cars another good example, which seems nowhere near scalability.

imo we're about 10 years behind where we would be if we had taken climate change half seriosuly.

but the idea it's not scalable is already disproven.

https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories...ergy-renewable

It is only in the last few years that the price of solar panels and wind turbines have dropped to competitive levels with oil and gas (coal was already losing to gas).

I think Covid had an impact because panels were mostly coming from China and production got stymied.

The bigger problem in the US is that oil & gas companies are buying off politicians, primarily the Republican party. In state parties they are passing all kinds of laws to keep people in the oil and gas market. In some states people would have to pay a significant amount of money to end their natural gas account (like $400). Similarly with the coming bills to forbid farmers to put wind turbines and/or solar panels on their property. Which is seriously messed up. It's their land.

The recent discussion about gas stoves is equally crazy. I read that the gas industry has over 1,800 influencers who are actively making it seem that electric stoves don't work. Or work as well. The irony is that in West Virginia more people have electric stoves than gas stoves. I am in the Czech Republic right now with an electric stovetop. No big deal. I wish I had had half a brain when we renovated our kitchen 8 years ago and got a fully electric stove and oven (our oven is electric). But back then it cost significantly more.

A very big reason that oil and gas are still somewhat competitive is the $20 billion+ a year they get in tax subsidies (I believe it is primarily being able to offset failed wells in the current tax year against other profits whereas every other industry has to deduct it over a 20 year period of time). These subsidies if they ended would hike gas prices and cause short term massive inflation But it would likely mean that all new electric plants built would be some form of renewable energy. If it weren't for Manchin and Synema these subsidies would be gone now.

Ultimately the US will go renewable energy sources because it will end up being cheaper and because we do need to make the planet habitable for humans. But it will take a long time because the development of electric power sources can't happen immediately. There are many power plants that can't be abandoned now due to loss of investment money (though in theory government subsidies could help stop electric company bankruptcies) But in terms of coal plants they will be shut down because the cost of coal (mining and shipping) will be more expensive than the electricity produced by the total cost of building wind turbines and solar panels and their connections to the power grid.

The incredible thing to me, that is not being considered at all, is human life and the medical costs associated with pollution. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people dying each year (around the world) due to pollution. Gas stoves themselves emit harmful fumes that cause significant amounts of asthma in the US alone. The ultimate irony is that the Republican party in the US has declared themselves to be Pro Life (as long as you haven't been born yet...)

Marian L Tupy ….
A guy working at Cato institute aka Koch ….
Libertarian
International relation seem to equal
Massive scientific knowledge in what he speak about here 0o.
Well done lozen .

Sadly when you keep crying wolf......

Not saying climate change is not a real thing

Oh NO!!! Not a Libertarian!!!

Fwiw I love libertarian view on a lot of things.
I hope u don’t see yourself as one ?

Why post video from Denier’s then ?

Fair enough.

But, "Libertarian" was on your list of things that you thought discredited that Tupy dude:

As ideology, libertarianism ideology can be appealing. However, outside the idealists on forums and subreddits, I find libertarians are mostly a political joke. Self-professed libertarian politicians and lobbyists are never actually libertarians.

As far as environmental concerns go, these "libertarians" tend to be very libertarian when weighing "corporate interests" of polluters. However, through some mental magic that is not meant to be understood by mere mortals, environmental concerns are somehow always an affront to personal freedom.

Because apparently air you can't breathe, important species becoming endangered, climate that lays waste to agriculture, empty water supplies, ruined seabeds, over-fished oceans and poisoned soil is not an issue for personal freedom.

I wonder where politics posters here fall on the notion that human population growth on Earth is a significant problem in terms of its net effect on pollution, climate change, etc.. It seems to be a potentially controversial topic that would be good for debate. The view of it being a problem is the more rational opinion for me personally.

You don't see a problem when a so called expert keeps making doomsday predictions that never happen?

Is human population a significant environmental problem? Of course. Thus, it stands to reason that an increase in human population would magnify the problem absent offsetting behavioral changes or technological solutions to environmental problems.

Human population seems likely to stabilize in about 75 years. I am skeptical that people will voluntarily change their habits enough to make a significant difference. Global, coordinated government compulsion could make a big difference, but the economic competition inherent in the current nation/state system is an obvious impediment to large scale coordination and cooperation. I am not qualified to predict what technological advances will emerge over the same period.

No one has been more consistently wrong than the yootoobe climate change denialists.

Suppose we do make effective technological advances and progress over the coming years. In conjunction with that, the question for me is how important are checks on human population growth, well before your predictive 75 years, to that end?

The problem I have with this video is that in the beginning he points out how improper recycling by consumers makes recycling programs less viable, but at the end he questions why people should bother taking the trouble to recycle correctly. I hate it when people don't recycle correctly, just dumping garbage into the receptacles, or paying no mind to what materials are designated as recyclable in accordance with local jurisdictions (although I concede that staying on top of those specifics can be trying). I don't know if a hypothetically perfect effort on the part of consumers would instantly make recycling a sensible environmental practice in the immediate term, but I think collective conscientiousness is likely beneficial to that end.

If you take plastic getting into the ocean for example, that seems like a big failure on the part of humanity. Why are we unable to prevent that? Hypothetically it seems like storing plastic waste in such a way that it doesn't get into the ocean should not be some kind of impossibility, but what does seem to be sure is that if there was a way to make it happen, it would require large-scale compliance and cooperation from consumers, which could in turn garner public support for any necessary monetary funding as well. So, in that vain, that is why I don't like lazy people failing to recycle properly. Collective shitty attitudes from consumers hinders progress going forward IMO. Programs and efforts that don't work in the immediate term can evolve and improve more readily to a net benefit if the collective attitude is on point.

Human population growth has been slowing for almost 60 years. It sounds like you are asking whether it is important for governments to implement additional coercive measures that would further slow population growth.

I haven't given that question any thought because I don't think it is at all likely that such measures will be implemented. Places like China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and various countries in western Europe already are alarmed about the economic consequences of declining birth rates and/or declining population. The U.S. is likely to join that club in the not too distant future. Inverted age structure is a very difficult economic problem to solve.

Your have here accurately described many libertarians.

However, there are also many libertarians who advocate for far stricter environmental regulations than do Republicans and Democrats. They argue, for example, that nobody has a right to pollute the air. These libertarians take the right-to-breathe very seriously.

Here in Canada we have banned single use plastics but the experts have ruled the program is a net loser



https://www.fraserinstitute.org/stud...-plastic-waste