Quote:
Originally Posted by multiweb
Energy intensity. Yep. You can't support the world machines supplying ~7billion people living like we do with wind and solar.
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Because we are too greedy, particularly the rich. What I miss in the energy discussion is: do we really need so much energy ?
Aircons are one of the worst offenders. These devices are the 100 year old inefficient Carrier design.
https://edition.cnn.com/style/articl...dia/index.html
https://edition.cnn.com/style/articl...dio/index.html
The second article tells about pre-aircon ways to cool buildings.
Addintionally, why not adapt our construction styles such as white painted roofs, or more green lush in cities ? More trees in cities cools better and are a CO2 sink as well.
Aviation ? Air tickets are heavily subsidized due to the
Chicago Treaty of 1944 because air tickets are exempt from GST and fuel is exempt from excise.
With the current low prices this is not anymore of this era.
Remembering myself: In 1986 I payed 1100 eurors (not inflation corrected otherwise it would be 3000 euros) (A$4500) for a roundtrip Amsterdam-Sydney and recently I booked the same route for upcoming Feb 2020 which is ... EUR 1100. And most air tickets barely increased in absolute price, but decreased strongly when inflation and income is taken into account.
So taxing and excising air travel is one thing to do. And short haul flights within EU with low cost carriers (e.g. Ryanair) cost in some cases even less
per kilometer then a cheap international ticket 5-10 times as far away.
The next step is using synfuel (and not biofuel, because that costs lots of agriculture area which is not available for food).
Quote:
Originally Posted by multiweb
Good day Carlton. I don't have an answer to the world energy problem. But what I'm sure of is that sinking money into renewables is definitely not the solution. It's very fashionable nowadays to talk about wind and solar. Makes people feel good about themselves. That's pretty much all it achieves. Numbers show that it's only a very small part of the total energy consumption.
The money would be better spent in fixing what we have. There is technology now to capture C02 emissions from a coal fired plant. It requires energy. About 30% of its energy output. Let's start doing that first before scrapping our only reliable source of electricity. That'll buy us some time while we think about fixing the rest one step at a time.
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CO2 capture devices are already there, those are called trees, but we are felling them in large amounts like in Brasil, Borneo and, helped by global warming, they are right now being burned away in half NSW and Victoria.