By all means, Will, go ahead and mock science. That will convince reasonable people that your political ideas are sensible. Maybe you can link up with the anti-vaccination crowd and get a cross-endorsement.
Yes. Yawn.
If we’re to condemn politicians who indulge in hyperbole, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez would be far down on the list, certainly behind a large number of Republicans.
And well behind someone who can’t stop prattling about “government stealing money at gunpoint”; or calling Obama and Hillary cold-blooded murderers.
The push for 100% renewable energy is a laudable goal, as any fraction of our energy production we capture with renewables reduces greenhouse gases and prolongs the supply of fossil fuels. Plus, when you think about the 4 trillion dollars we spent on the middle eastern wars to make them just stable enough to extract oil, it is good economic and national security policy as well.
California has already committed to do so and starting today I can sign up for 100% renewable electricity generation. A greener energy company has taken over from PG&E in my town, and I get a discount from mostly renewable electricity generation, and if I choose to pay the same rate I’m paying now I can get 100% renewable.
Well…the population of Norway is less than 6 million. We have cities bigger than that. And the population of the other ones in your second link are still less. So, yeah…it’s a bit odd to think that a nation as large as the US could be 100% renewable, especially if you take nuclear out of the mix…which we have. And we’ve taken hydro-electric out of the mix as well…no new hydro plants will be built in the US, and like nuclear that means 10 little nuclear plants, 9 little nuclear plants, 8 little nuclear plants…and then there was 1. In the lifetimes of posters on this board the last nuclear plant will switch off and go bye-bye in the US, unless there is some sort of sea change that doesn’t seem apparent today. So, renewable in the US context is solar, wind and in some special places geo-thermal. And there is simply no way those things will ever scale up to meet our needs 100%.
Well, in 40 years I guess we might be able to add fusion to the mix…
35 years ago I toured the Tokamak fusion lab in Princeton, which was on the verge of a breakthrough. It would be nice, but 40 years seems optimistic.
I don’t know if fusion counts as strictly renewable, but unless fusion reactors caused some sort of problem, I suspect even the greenest of the green wouldn’t have a problem.
Well, they have set the goal, but it’s unclear to me how they will reach it. They get something like 15% from hydro…and that is not going to increase (probably the reverse at some point). 10% or so from nuclear and that will certainly decline. Maybe 5% from geothermal which could, maybe increase at some point. 3-4% from solar, which I doubt will come up that much but maybe enough to compensate for the nuclear decline. The most renewable they get is wind, and I think they have mainly tapped out the really good tier 1 spots already, though I could be wrong. I think they get nearly 30% from wind IIRC. The rest is from coal and natural gas, basically. Not only will they have to compensate from the decline in nuclear and hydro over that time period but they have to cut into coal and natural gas, which is a whole lot of power they have to get from somewhere (of course, they DO get power from other states as well, so I guess that could help them reach their goal…though doesn’t actually fix the issue :p).
Eh, aim for 100%, maybe we get to 50% at some point not too far away. If we aim for 50%, the same number of oil- and pollution-loving heads will explode. No use trying to appease the dead-enders.
From what I understand, the best case scenario today is that IF the current test fusion plants are able to final produce more energy than they use to start the reaction and IF there is a way to commercialize, that 40 years is the target for when they will start building those plants. So, no…I was mostly tongue in cheek there wrt fusion.
50% is definitely do-able IMHO. We could be doing that today in fact (France gets 70% or so from nuclear alone, so they are there…and they actually have a pretty big population and industry).
Impossible!
It seems like when I was growing up, all I heard was how great the US was; and now all I hear is that the US can’t do things that other countries can, be it universal healthcare, drug legalization & harm reduction, or now energy infrastructure.
Needless to say, we can achieve a 100% renewable energy grid. Plans exist already. The only barrier is American dumbassery, and that’s why we need leaders like AOC to push the idea aggressively.
We can’t do other things that other countries do when you compare them in an apples to oranges way and handwave away the differences. Norway is a sparely populated country that also has some advantages wrt renewable energy due to it’s small size and concentrated population that the US doesn’t have, seeing as how we are a continent sized nation with hundreds of millions of people spread out over that continent. The US can’t realistically achieve 100% renewable energy over the entire country no matter how smart we are because it’s not possible, especially when you take nuclear off the table. Even WITH nuclear it would be very difficult and would cost the world. Providing power for 5 million people is fairly easy…we do that all the time in large cities. Providing power for 320 million people spread out across a nation the size of the US is a bit more difficult. Or, to put it another way, come back when Canada gets to 100% renewable energy and call us dumbasses. Canada, of course, has a much smaller population, but when THEY figure out how to power up a continent sized nation even with their more limited population then you can say the US population are idiots 'cause we can’t.
100% of electricity isn’t 100% of energy use (the OP is about all energy, not just electricity). Norway is to be congratulated for having abundant rivers, but not all countries, and certainly not the US, has the geography and precipitation of Norway.
And Norway pays for all that infrastructure by, in part… selling oil to the rest of the world.
We could do better, but let’s keep things in perspective.
C’mon, it’s not like each nation gets an energy cube, and the larger countries have to spread theirs too thinly. Larger countries have more potentially-exploitable sources for energy. It’s not as simple as small = easy, large = impossible.
Canada is at 66% renewable, and aggressively investing in more.
The US is at 18%. Now, you can claim this is purely due to technological factors (and again, check out the Stanford plan I mentioned earlier: costly, but achievable), but I live in Kentucky, and do you know what I saw all through election season? Ads about keeping the coal industry propped up. Over and over again, coal, coal, coal, coal. We elected a president who believes climate change to be a Chinese plot, and hey presto, is actively working against renewable energy. The dumbass slipper fits.
The OP is claiming that renewable energy means banning campfires, or something. It has no connection to what the rest of the world means by “renewable energy”.
(Bolding mine)
Actually, yes. Wood heating is renewable in that trees appropriate for fuel grow at a sustainable rate, with the will to do so. The environmental problem is air pollution, plus most home wood-burners in the US don’t heat all that well. Both problems are solved through simple technology such as
masonry heaters or their even greener cousins, rocket mass heaters.
The quote in my own words: "We need to do everything we can to work towards a non-oil, non-coal, non-nuclear-energy society.
As for whether or not campfires and matches are okay: from what I have read, wood is “renewable” as more wood can be grown to replace it. Matches “probably” fall into that category as well, although who knows what the match heads are made of. However, they wouldn’t fall into a “Green New Deal” as both are carbon-releasing fuel sources, which is the real “selling point” of solar and wind.
I agree, but that doesn’t have anything to do with my post.
The US is not Norway, so saying Norway gets X% of its electricity from renewables isn’t much of an argument. It’s a start, and I don’t mean to denigrate it, but you have to look at the whole the issue. The US isn’t going to get most of its electricity from hydro plants. That’s just not in the cards, even though it is for Norway. And where would Norway be if it wasn’t selling oil to the rest of the world to burn, some of which goes into electricity production. OTOH, we have vast deserts with lots of sunshine for solar energy that Norway does not have.
It’s also worth cutting the young Congresscritter some slack. Give her a chance to flesh out her plan rather than attacking the soundbite. If she starts out shooting for a goal of 100%, but ends up with a goal of 50% or 75%, that will be a success.
I’m really not sure why it’s even an issue to nitpick her anyway. She’s a Freshman Representative that will have exactly zero power. Her only real path toward getting anything done is that she’s young, photogenic, and says things that are just controversial enough to get media attention so she could lead a populist rebellion against leadership, but more likely she’ll end up on the Housing and Insurance sub-committee along with all of the other freshmen.
That’s fair, I didn’t mean to be dismissive of your post. Apologies.
It’s an argument against the notion that attempting 100% renewable energy is “odd”. No, we can’t copy Norway’s exact model. If you look at the Jacobson plan I linked to, it breaks down as follows for the US in 2050:
14.5% residential rooftop solar
19.5% solar plants
11.5% concentrating solar plants
11.8% commercial and government rooftop solar
21.3% onshore wind
17.1% offshore wind
1.1% wave devices
0.4% geothermal
2.8% hydroelectric
Note that it doesn’t propose copying Norway’s grid, but instead playing to the US’ strengths of lots of space and sunshine (hence, 57.3" solar).
She didn’t say anything unreasonable, but yes, anything above 18% is a win, especially in the current political climate.