What is your position on fracking?

I have mixed feelings about this. While renewables definitely have a role to play and their use should be encouraged, they are not ready for the way humans use energy.

Take Solar for example, you have many days in the year (depending on location) when sunlight is limited and it is totally absent during nights. Battery technology can change that but so far it has been elusive and not for the lack of trying. Spain’s switch to solar power (one of the best countries in terms of location) to Solar power has had mixed reviews.

So what Solar does in practical term is to make the power producers invest in two power plants - one that works during the day (Solar) and one that works during the night and cloudy days (natural gas). Sure it cuts back CO2 emissions but it has to subsidized in one form or the other.

Similar limitations are encountered by wind because it blows mostly at night and is very location specific.

Hydro has its own problems with environmental effects especially fish populations.

The carbon footprint of the internet is 300 million tons of CO2 per year : more than half the CO2 emissions of the UK. This is just an example of things we take for granted.

Almost all metrics for human development are linked with the increased use of energy and there are more have nots than haves in the world.

No, that would be fast-tracking nuclear.

Do both. But natural gas is MUCH faster. Natural gas turbines can be made in months. Nuclear power plants can take 5-10 years, assuming they don’t get blocked by endless injunctions.

I see natiral gas turbines as a transitional technology. As we transition to nuclear, the gas turbines can be repurposed to provide baseload for wind and solar when necessary, because in many places solar and wind actually make sense. So let’s do all of it, intelligently, with an eye to what’s actually possible and politically feasible in various time frames.

They’ve found reserves in France, and for a while they envisioned taping them, then it seems they abandoned the idea for the time being due to the opposition of the environmentalists and greens who aren’t completely irrelevant over here from an electoral point of view.

I’m perfectly happy with it. These gas reserves aren’t going anywhere, and so they can be exploited in the future if it becomes absolutely necessary. Even ignoring completely the environmental issues, it’s not a bad thing to keep untapped reserves, at the contrary. I’m sure we’ll keep needing gas and oil for a while.

And since there have been a lot of arguments going back and forth, meanwhile we can look at the USA and other countries who started this process and see how it goes there and if it’s as bad as some say, or as innocuous as others say. And maybe even better, more environment-friendly, methods will be discovered.

From my point of view, it seems urgent to wait, as whoever said.

Fracking killed coal.

Why the focus on reductions? It’s a lot easier to reduce your usage if it’s insanely high than if it’s closer to the median. Germany has far lower per capita emissions than the US, so even if they are struggling to lower them further, copying a horrible example such as the US wouldn’t be the best idea.

When compared to US, Germany does have lower emissions. But the UK has even less than Germany. And even coal burning Poland has less per capita CO2 than Germany. Cite http://pdf.wri.org/navigating_numbers_chapter4.pdf

IIRC, Germany has gone back to coal after removing nuclear. Much of Europe is dependent on Russia for energy - something that doesn’t jive with their national security.

Yeah, but why aren’t there similar injunctions regarding the local environmental impact of fracking? Why are fossil fuels allowed to allocate their costs onto innocent 3d parties?

Consider looking at emissions per GDP (or the inverse). Poland performs poorly by that measure, the US middling, and Germany and the UK well. Poland has lower per capita emissions, but much much lower per capita GDP.

Do both or everything sounds good and a way of bridging divides. But two basic facts remain about nuclear power:
-it produces way more expensive electricity than natural gas fired combined cycle gas turbine plants in US conditions of construction cost and gas prices…due to the fracking revolution. Embedded in that is the much longer lead time and risk of (common) huge cost overruns in nuclear. Time is money (interest paid on construction loans when the thing being constructed isn’t producing revenue yet)

-the local regulatory/NIMBY aspect of the high cost in US conditions, which is anyway only part of the cost problem, cannot be waved away with a magic wand no matter how many professional or amateur pundits do it in media or internet web boards respectively. That’s built into the US legal and political system.

The first question in anybody’s plan for a big new nuclear effort is who is going to pay the enormous extra cost. Which is a general question for CO2 cutting plans, but in case of wind and solar power as long as they still a fairly small % of total generating capacity the cost now isn’t that much higher than gas plants. When people expect (or dream) of a grid mainly powered by renewables, same issue, who is going to pay the much higher prices to make such a grid stable and workable? But in the current situation mandates to have 10%,15% etc renewables don’t push that much cost. Not a big problem…nor a big solution.

On the bigger question of GHG globally am77494 and I are on the same wavelength. Any plan which doesn’t include aggressive research* and willingness to take some risk in direct climate management is not realistic. Discussions of ultimately politically feasible decarbonization policies in rich countries are one thing. But there’s no way the developing world will give up development to cut CO2 and no way overall world CO2 emissions will be drastically cut in the next few decades.

*along obviously with research into cheap carbon-free energy but there’s already a massive profit incentive for that. Direct climate engineering OTOH is arbitrarily shunned as a ‘too risky’ in favor of big CO2 reductions in the next few decades, which simply are not going to happen at today’s technology.

Probably unsteady, if it is happening directly underneath me.

I agree that that is likely a far better measurement than per capita emissions.

Although in the end, emissions are emissions. I’m not sure I want to point to a measure as best. But we should be aware of different measures.

Consider scrutinizing the same list. Switzerland is rated 4th, it’s neighbor France 9th, and it’s neighbor Italy 26th, while there is nothing Switzerland does significantly different in terms of limiting CO2 emissions. Maybe it’s just because Switzerland gets a lot of its GDP from banking.

Any metric user will have positives and negatives.

The point I was making earlier is that we need to develop Global Dimming technologies hand in hand with cutting back CO2 emissions.

Consider reading all the posts before posting.

There are lots of flaws in the country rankings.

Consider two countries - one makes products such as textiles and grain. The other makes steel. Then they trade steel for textiles and grain, and both contries consume the steel and textiles and grain in equal measure.

The steel producing country will have a higher CO2 footprint per capita if we measure them in isolation, but both are actually equally responsible since both consume the same goods.

Then you get other differences that aren’t really about consumption and choces. Some countries are small and have desnse populations. These countries will generally have smaller CO2 footprints, because they don’t spend as much energy in housing and transportation. A country like Canada, on the other hand, is gigantic, cold, and the population is spread out.

Further, cuontries don’t have the same renewable energy sources. Iceland has a lot of geothermal energy. California has lots of sun energy. Some countries have large amounts of hydro available and others don’t.

For the purpose of this discussion, which is nominally about ways to generate electricity, as implied by the main sidetrack into gas, nuclear, coal electricity generation, it would be most relevant to compare countries according to carbon intensity of electricity generation per kW-hr, not overall emissions per person or per $ of GDP. The other measures might be relevant in other contexts, but in this context they just bring in a lot of factors extraneous to the point, eg. it’s not going to cut or increase the energy use of the industries which happen to be in a given country, how widely spaced people are (transport), how hot/cold it is (AC/heating demand), etc just to change the method of generating electricity, holding all else constant.

This paper on electricity generation carbon intensity among European countries puts Germany at 519 g/kWh of carbon, kWh of electricity produced, 599 per kWh of electricity consumed (losses). That’s far higher than France, 100 on the second measure (lots of nuclear), much lower than Poland 937 (lots of coal), somewhat higher than the EU average 428.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1361920916307933

This paper quotes the recent US level as 439. It’s not clear from the wording if that’s produced or consumed. It’s declined 30% in the US 2001-17.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabe9d

I like this measure.

I think it is a necessary evil. It is going to take a while for us to upgrade and replace our current infrastructure to handle renewable energy sources. While fracking is horrible for local communities, it does produce natural gas which is way less polluting than coal. It also gives the US a level of energy independence that frees up money for other parts of our economy. But we should be working in tandem to develop and install as many renewables as possible with the goal of removing all fossil fuel from out consumption.

The only places I’m firmly against it are where there is a fresh water shortage, which sadly is a lot of America including California and a lot of the Great Plains. Elsewhere, I think that like a lot of other fossil fuels, we should listen to the local population, the ones that would be affected by local pollution and suffer any eminent domain confiscations. If a county in NYS or Pennsylvania is fine with taking the risk of fracking, I can’t tell them not to do it. We still need our fossil fuels to come from somewhere, be it fracking, traditional gas, oil, or coal.