This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1433060
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1433060
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Thanks for publishing Dr. Wu’s piece. In terms of importance, two of every three TPM stories deserve to be on this topic. Unfortunately humans are rather conceited so we would rather read about heroes and villains with faces and personalities. Much to our own detriment.
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My cottage in Connecticut doesn’t currently have air conditioning. Historically, we maybe had a couple of days a year that were any kind of hot. This year, it was abominable, to the point where (at goat snuggles) one of the patrons had to be taken by ambulance for heat exhaustion.
I’ve talked to my contractor about getting A/C installed, probably in first quarter next year (since I’m not full-time yet). Daughter tells me it was downright dangerous to not have it this past summer and there’s no expectation that next and subsequent years will be any more comfortable.
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The Republican Party (among the country’s most dangerous organizations) is responsible for the negligence attendant to this state of affairs. But there is not enough focus on that.
Instead, this party is planning an assault on our democracy…making things worse
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We just had a heat pump installed. Despite the name, it both heats in the winter and cools in the summer, is more energy efficient, and you can get at least 4k back from the government if you install one.
We are trying to move away from fossil fuels, and by next year will have a totally solar electric system, though we may need a small propane tank for heating water when it gets really cold.
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We’re doing a ductless HVAC system (the cottage is only 900SQFT) and it will have a heat pump available. I already have an oil furnace. The contractor is looking at the magnitude of the rebates for the installation. They apparently vary by town here in CT.
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10 - 15 flushes otta take care of it according to a world renown climatologist
We have a wood burning stove in the living room. I absconded with it from my former grad student abode in Pullman, WA when I moved to Tucson in 1980.
We have a newly installed AC. Heat device on our roof that we use as sparingly as possible.
It’s a dry heat ya knowns, except when it’s a down pour like yesterday afternoon. We have 90’s from April to October (100’s most of June and July) and it doesn’t make the news like it would in California.
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Requiem for a dying planet:
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My Republican friends (not politicians) are still largely stuck on “Oh, we’ve always had floods. We’ve always had hurricanes. There have always been heat waves.” and so on for every new catastrophe.
Being willfully innumerate, they refuse to consider the increasing number, frequency and scale of all these events. And they always fall back on the old “Electric cars? Sure … but they’ll be coal-powered, because that’s where electricity comes from” and of course “Solar is way too expensive; same for wind.” This disregards both the radical changes in the electricity sources on the grid in the last decade and the dramatically falling prices of renewables.
It’s like some kind of religion. We will depend almost entirely on oil & gas because we have ALWAYS depended on oil & gas. Ditto coal. Regardless of what’s going on IRL.
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Carbon Capture and Storage is currently a pipe dream so if anyone out there thinks this technology is a viable solution might need to reconsider:
CCS/DAC are boondoggles that cannot possibly meet the needs of society. Just look at the numbers in MAR’s post. The resources do not exist for the scale needed – and CC tech is just one industry that would have to grow massively over the next few decades just to supposedly get to net zero, which is incredibly dangerously slow and risks flipping tipping point after tipping point.
But billions $$$ are being thrown at it.
Ridiculous.
Re resource limits: https://www.clubhouse.com/room/myog1Aln?utm_medium=ch_room_xerc&utm_campaign=0vIh7fkq9PMM2ZU9Db7TFQ-376286
More on Wyoming’s attempt at Carbon Capture Storage (CCS) and Direct Air Capture (DAC).
5Mt(CO2)/y of DAC&S in Wyoming will do just dandy given Wyoming currently emits 60Mt(CO2)/y from FF use.
The company agrees that this project’s 2030 target for DAC&S is just 0.01% of global annual emissions (hopefully they don’t mean ‘2030 annual emissions’ because that would be a bit awful if emissions were running at such high numbers by then: it would be a 25% increase on today’s emissions) and elsewhere the company say “By 2050, DAC companies will capture upwards of 5 to 10 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.” So they do appreciate the scale of the required CO2 drawdown we need to mitigate the worse of AGW. Meinshausen et al (2020) fig2c suggests SSP1-1.9 will require net negative emissions of 230Gt© = 845Gt(CO2) between 2050 and 2180, the peak value shown being 14Gt(CO2)/yr. And that is the net value.
But this company does seem rather vague on the energy requirements of their project and the form of the CO2 being locked away in “the perfect CO2 storage geology” These are the major considerations for this technology which brave words will not magic away…
All of my postings on Climate Change can be found at realclimate.org
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Science advances one funeral at a time.
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I always enjoy watching these people float by on the evening news. Kentucky is just a recent example.
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Which would be extremely deadly. Rethugs must be kept away from the levers of power. They will kill us.
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That this is a world-wide phenomenon is the scariest part to me. We are going to wait until it’s almost too late to fix it.
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We can’t just blame Republicans. There are plenty of Democratic politicians who don’t do what they should to mitigate the problem. And both liberals and conservatives are unwilling to do the one thing necessary to prevent this - reduce global population by voluntarily limiting the number of children we have.
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I assume you have done your bit already?
Blasphemy! Capitalism depends on an ever increasing consumer base!
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Much like building construction codes.
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When everything you try to do gets blocked by McTurtle it becomes pointless. People are going to have to really suffer before they understand that Physics and Chemistry are non-negotiable.
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