Well, a lot of what you said after is ok, but it is not a pipe dream when examples of what can be done are available.
That isn’t what you seem to be arguing tho. You seem to be arguing both positions simultaneously and in isolation.
If it is impossible, then it doesn’t matter than we aren’t like Norway: no one could do it.
But we know it can be done: Norway did it.
If it can be done, then you’re saying we can’t figure out how to do it. Norway figured out how to do it; why can’t the United States?
Why do you have no faith in the ingenuity of the United States to be able to come up with a solution that will work for the United States?
Should we listen to climate scientists?
No, let’s listen to random people with keyboards on the Internet.
(Present company excepted of course.)
Wait for Canada at 100% renewable? Then we think about a real carbon tax? Are you sure you don’t want to wait until the U.S. passes China in absolute CO2 emissions? Is it fair to the American people to have a carbon tax if we’re not even the world’s #1 emitter?
I could appreciate a conservative writing “I applaud AOC’s initiative and respectfully hope that a study of clean nuclear energy be part of her program.” But that is not the viewpoint one gets by reading some of the anti-AOC posts in this thread.
No sense hoping for help from the GOP or the Trumpists. I’d ask thoughtful conservatives to start voting Democratic if they want to participate in the debate.
Even the American Enterprise Institute is now looking with favor on a carbon tax.
Yes. I’m disappointed that some Dopers need to have this pointed out.
Thank you for this post.
Wow. It boggles the mind to try to imagine your world-view. I suppose you fantasize that some bureaucrat, seeing onshore wind heading for 22% while offshore wind is barely aiming at 16%, will take his team of gopniks out to windfarms and demand, at gunpoint, that the turbines and towers be dismantled and moved off-shore.
I thought you favored free market solutions? Can you not understand that the quoted figures are just guesstimated projections for what the market result will be when carbon consumers must afford the “external” cost of climate change?
@ WillFarnaby — Do you consider the American Enterprise Institute to be a proponent of Soviet-style central planning?
I would have thought the whole idea renewable power generation would be attractive to independent pioneer types who dream of taking their home off-grid. If you live in a suitable location, the technology is becoming viable on a domestic scale. Solar panels, a small wind turbine and a box of batteries. Harvest your own energy to power your home and electric car. If 100% renewable means 0% energy and fuel bills, that is an attractive proposition. It is not common yet, but the costs are steadily coming down.
I would not be surprised if there were not one or two people hearabouts who are ahead of the game.
These renewable technologies are not the sole preserve of big corporations and big government with their huge installations with all the political chicanery that goes with that.
I agree with most of that, however, though I’m uncertain if we can really get to 80% by 2050…I think we can, but it’s going to be a lot harder to do without nuclear. But that’s the thing…we are talking about getting there by 2050…maybe. That’s why I said it’s not impossible, just unfeasible in the short term and very, very difficult (and expensive).
It would be sad if after all these decades of being completely neutral on energy policy, the government now began to show favoritism towards one part of the energy industry for the first time ever.
Not sure where your confusion on this is coming from, but let me spell it out for you. Norway has about 5 million total population. Their country has very large coastal regions and lots and lots of rivers. They have a mainly very concentrated population. They also have large oil reserves. These things together mean they have plenty of money to produce the renewable energy they need (wrt their total population), they have a small concentrated population to do it, and they have the natural environment that makes doing it feasible for their population. They get 96% of their produced energy from hydro-electric dams and water storage systems…and about 2% from wind farms. Hydro is very reliable, especially when your entire country is full of rivers, lakes and streams, making it feasible to put that sort of thing into production. In addition, we are talking about 30-40k MW installed with 139 TWh produced. The US has something like 5000 TWh…we have more solar production than Norway has total.
So, we can’t possibly, under any circumstances be Norway. We won’t ever be a small country, we won’t every have all special circumstances that enable them to get to 100% renewable energy. For us to do it, we’d need to spend an astronomical amount of money AND we’d need the political will to do things that, today, are pretty much impossible…such as build nuclear power plants and tap each and ever tier 1 and probably a lot of the tier 2 wind spots, build hundreds of square miles of solar panels and tap more heavily into geo-thermal…and probably re-evaluate our stance on hydro-electric as well. I’m fairly sure that any given person is going to have issues with some of those, either on the paying part or on the doing part (hell, I have issues with more hydro-electric at this point). It’s not something we just need to figure out…it’s not that sort of problem. Unless you mean figure out how to get fusion on a more compressed time table AND get it into production all over. Or figure out how to make magic batteries or build a loss free grid for pennies a mile. Or get orbital arrays of solar panels to beam huge amounts of steady energy back to the planet. Or other sci-fi type solutions. None of which, no matter what we do, are going to be ready for use in less than the 2050 Gigo mentioned for us to maybe get to 80%. This isn’t because Americans are stupid or ignorant or whatever else folks what to toss out, it’s because reality is what it is and we are talking a scale that most don’t seem to get. Like I said, when someone shows me Canada getting to 100% (not 60% or 70%) renewable energy THEN that would be a road map for how the US might be able to do it…if we scaled whatever it is up to our size population and geographic diversity of population.
This is not 30% of the primary energy consumption it is for the electricity production.
In this thread there is a great deal of confused usage confusing the Energy Production with that of the electricity production.
They are not the synonyms.
To take the Norway as the example since it is cited here, it is necessary to look at the total energy, as the electricity is only one component.
For the year 2013
Primary energy
(TWh): 380
Electricity
(TWh): 118.5
Added the emphasis, it is not a minor point that there is the confusion between the electricity generation and the primary energy generation, and this can cause the very serious misunderstanding and thus incomprehension of the economic challenge.
the ingenuity of the americans has nothing to do with it, it is the scale of the infrastructure and the structure of the locations.
The USA can of course do better in the generation of the rewewable low carbon energy for the electricity, but the idea of going so fast to 100 percent even for the electricity on the basis of the Norway is making very self decieving analysis.
One thing politicians could do to help renewable is to cut red tape on installation. It costs $10,000 more to install residential solar in the US than it does in Australia and permitting alone can take 6 months.
I know of one guy in California who wanted to install solar panels in his house but the law said that he had to have a cutoff switch accessible from the front of his property which meant he would have had to build an underground conduit from his house at the expense of over 10 grand and he decided to skip it.
“MRI concluded that the $25 billion (1958) spent on civilian space R&D during the 1959-69 period returned $52 billion through 1970 and will continue to stimulate benefits through 1987, for a total gain of $181 billion.”
One or two people are already doing this, true. But as is the case for so many things, it only matters if one or two hundred million do them.
That’s a far more difficult proposition for many reasons. The overwhelming obstacle today is lack of storage. If an area has a calm but cloudy day then all those home devices will not be producing electricity. If they are not connected to the grid, then they’re out of luck. Batteries won’t cut it. If they are connected to the grid, then the grid has to produce as much electricity as needed to run everybody, just as if no home devices existed.
On a national level, getting the entire grid off non-renewables has to be the priority. That means the grid needs a variety of different types of production to handle off-days. And it means that developing the many types of storage now being experimented with is critical.
The sooner we make a national commitment to doing so, the better. It will take a combination of free market and government backing to do so. No central planning, of course. Anybody mentioning the words automatically exclude themselves from rational conversation. But government has been the largest source of R&D funding since WWII. Put those dollars to work and the payback will be many times that of the moon program.
She said “a Green New Deal”. You do know what the original New Deal was, don’t you? It was a series of programs planned and carried out by the federal government. Not state governments, not local governments, not private organizations, not a grass-roots movement - the federal government.
So Ms. Ocasio-Cortez stated that our lives depended on having the federal government plan and implement a series of programs to eliminate fossil fuels. It’s fair to refer to that as central planning.
She is, or is going to be, a federal legislator, after all.
Regards,
Shodan
She stated no such thing. Are you capable of responding to words as they are written without “reinterpreting” them to fit whatever argument you want to push?
Congratulations. They say that there aren’t any new ideas, but that’s obviously wrong. Has anybody ever referred to the New Deal as central planning before? Is that the latest from Infowars? Even for conservatives, it’s a hell of a stretch. In the old days, they’d fight you in the street if you had the audacity to say that anything in New Deal was planned. They threw stuff at a wall to see what stuck. They were the anti-Planners!
Central planning refers to measures utterly different than the hodge-podge of short-term emergency programs that lasted only until the Supreme Court shot them down. And with the USSR loudly boasting of its five-year plans, no America government in the 1930s would dare copy them. That would never get by the isolationalist, anti-Communist conservatives in Congress, a bunch that includes the Southern Democrats FDR needed to pass legislation.
The federal government doesn’t centrally plan our economy or pieces of them. (Not even farm subsidies, odious as they are, amount to central planning of agriculture.) Never has. WillFarnaby is upset because he disapproves of every single thing the federal government does. The only positive to say about his beliefs is that they form a consistent philosophy.
What’s your excuse?
The experts I pointed out are not talking about 100%, although a goal like that with better technology and more time is not unreasonable. And speaking of self deceiving, I understood that primary energy and secondary are:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/21c/sustainable_energy/using_energyrev1.shtml
So, pointing at the primary energy numbers of Norway and implying as if that was excluding the solutions that we are talking about is not accurate.
That would be a foolish waste of government resources. Because we don’t need a government program to eliminate fossil fuels; we’re already using them up. So they’ll be eliminated without any government action being needed.
But what Ocasio-Cortez actually said was that we should be supporting development of other energy sources. Which, when you consider that whole “using up fossil fuels” thing I just mentioned, is probably a good idea.
It’s possible, of course, that our lives won’t depend on this. Maybe at some point before we run low on fossils fuels we will transform into beings of pure thought who no longer need energy. But I don’t think that’s something we should count on.
So what Ocasio-Cortez is saying is that we should be working on finding solutions to a problem that we can see coming and which would have huge negative effects if we don’t develop plans for it. Which sounds to me like something our government should probably be doing.
Plus, in the words of my Orgo teacher: “we could use it to make medications, plastics, clothing… and no! We burn it! BURN IT!”
He wasn’t very fond of combustion reactions.
[quote=“GIGObuster, post:75, topic:824561”]
The experts I pointed out are not talking about 100%/quote]
Did I quote or reply to you? Non, I did not.
So it is strange to reply as if I was. I replied to the person talking about energy and 100% without making the difference between total and primary energy production and the electricity.
Perhaps you should look at the post again and try to reread for the improved understanding.
I pointed to the primary and the electricity numbers of the Norway to highlight that the Norway’s utilization of energy can not be reduced simply to citing the Electricity production from the primary sources that are rewewable.
The reduction of talking of energy to the electricity - which may be only 50% of a country energy consumption - is a common but serious error.
and it is occuring several times throughout this thread.
It is damaging to the otherwise very good case for the renewables.
Uh uh, and where does it says in the rules that we can not reply to others?
And… I still have to reply that two wrongs do not make a right. It actually makes more harm to the ones disparaging the progress that is there already.
Nowhere - but since I said nothing about rules and only observed that it is strange to reply to someone as if they were commenting on your comment or something 100% not what they were replying to… and something like a strawman distortion.
???..there is zero coherence in this. What does this have to do with anything?