My country is going to commit economic suicide ...

[Red Squirrel]

Reminds me of when our premier Kathleen Wynne years back looked into banning natural gas here in Ontario.  Easy for her to say from a building in middle of Toronto where they hardly even see Winter.    Hydro prices keep going up like crazy here so heating with hydro would be unfeasible.  I'm all for reducing carbon, but the way governments go about it is wrong. Instead of making carbon based energy more expensive or banning it, they need to make the alternatives cheaper and more accessible.

Cars are a good start.  Make electric cars more standard instead of a niche thing.  I would like to be able to find an electric car on the used market for <$5k but that's not going to happen when even new ones are rarely sold.

[Marco]

The 'lesser' developed European countries are necessary for cheap labour and manufacturing. Be happy they are inside the EU!

If they were in a customs union we could have just outsourced there.

[NorthGuy]

I'm all for reducing carbon, but the way governments go about it is wrong.

You don't say. It's even worse here.

I'm off grid and 80% of my electric power comes from solar. The remaining 20% comes from natural gas generator and I have to pay carbon tax on the gas used for that purpose.

Most of the population get 99% of their energy from burning the same natural gas in big plants. They don't pay carbon tax. Instead, they get subsidies from the Alberta government to alleviate high cost of electricity.

Governments are not after reducing carbon. They only care about votes.

[SiliconWizard]

Governments are not after reducing carbon. They only care about votes.

Votes and taxes.

[Kjelt]

Yesterday the bill was presented to the press and it is not so shocking as presented here.
It is merely a statement of intent without any clause where the government could be helt accountable if it is not going to succeed and not even the intermediate targets are stated.
So if we do nothing till 2049 and everything in the last year it is still ok.
Ofcourse we are going to start but all the panic is just media hype as can be expected in what we call here the cucumber period ( a period where there is little shocking news and the media is blowing up the little things to attract readers)

[IanMacdonald]

I've covered a lot of these issues on our website, along with some in-depth science. However, to recap:

The original land temperature records for the USA show that the 1930's were warmer that the present decade. (Yeah, I didn't believe that when I saw it, but I've plotted the genuine data and it IS true.) Evidence of tampering with historical data is now emerging for some other regions. It will be interesting to see how this pans out, but it's kinda looking bad for the alarmists.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas but its effect is logarithmic, and once beyond 40ppm further increases have only small effects. This is why you would not expect the industrial era increase to cause much warming. 

The statement that 'Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas' is complete BS. Its effect is tiny. 

(You can check all of this with the online MODTRAN)

The IPCC claims that the effect of CO2 will be amplified by 'feedbacks' - but you can't have controlled amplification by a positive feedback loop whose output is directly connected to the input. (Both are air temperature.)   

Sea levels are indeed rising, but at 3mm per year, and they've been doing that since before the industrial era. Furthermore you can't have greater sea level rise in one place than in another on the same land mass. 

The sea is alkaline, and when you add a small amount of acid to an alkali you reduce the corrosiveness of the solution. Not, increase. School chemistry 101.

Even Wikipedia, that bastion of climate hysteria, states that severe weather events were stronger and more common in the 1930's than today. (The apparent higher cost of storm damage today stems from large numbers of flimsy buildings being put up in hurricane allleys)

The Greens are fanatically against shale gas, but want to do geothermal energy. Which uses the identical fracking process they say will cause disasters.

Meanwhile, climate change mitigation activities cost the world around $1.5 trillion US Dollars a year. The effectiveness so far has been ... NIL. CO2 is still increasing at the same rate as before it all started. When you think about the colossal amount of money involved, more than the GDP of many countries, what other things could have been done with this money that would have actually benefitted humanty, or the planet? 

That, and Greenpeace want to stop fusion research. I think we can see why. Considering that it would only cost five days' worth of global climate expenditure to complete ITER, it must worry them that it could put an stop to all of this. 

[Marco]

Okay, so it's only fairy tales by 2030 instead of suicide. It's still deplorable that government gets together for a big game of pretend.

The complete stop of CO2 emissions by 2050 are going to have fairly immediate repercussions though AFAICS. The economic life of generating plants means we can't really build any new ones. So we'll have to start importing a lot more electricity.

[Kjelt]

We need a new big nuclear powerplant, but we don't have any big enough location for it.
Second if I was in govt I would immediately stop expanding the nr of flights from the airports, they keep on growing because it doesn't count as CO2 pollution on our books 

[Marco]

That would do nothing but fuck a little with peons and hurt our economy. The peons would simply go to a non peon fucking neighbour to get on a flight, emitting more CO2 in the process ...

[SiliconWizard]

The 'lesser' developed European countries are necessary for cheap labour and manufacturing. Be happy they are inside the EU!

If they were in a customs union we could have just outsourced there.

Not even needed. Western developed countries have been outsourcing an enormous chunk of industrial and even intellectual activities to China, India and a lot of developing countries. Don't think we have waited for them to be in the EU.

[SiliconWizard]

we already passed legislation to retire at 67-68 while the french are still striking to retire at 55-60. Not that we are happy with it but we see the necessity

Nope.
Exponentially growing automation means less need for workers in general.
This means that the smaller amount of work needs to be redistributed between people, which means we have to reduce the work time very soon.
Bullshit jobs will also be phased out at some point.

The continuous trend has been to optimize businesses, thus needing less people and less means in general for the same amount of work, which makes perfect sense in terms of efficiency alone. Work automation has been a continuous trend as well in the history of mankind and is indeed showing signs of extreme acceleration.

The only way we can have more jobs available is thus to create proportionally A LOT more businesses and/or make them grow a lot faster. *This* is already a lot more dubious in the mid- to long-term. There is no consistent reason as of now to think that the ever increasing economic activity that proponents of the infinite growth believe in will compensate for the loss of jobs. As with most economic matters, we just don't have a clue, but current trends kind of fail to show that it's going to really work out this way.

For the record, caricatural statements are fun but we need to get real. Nobody is expecting nor striking to retire at 55, except maybe for a few specific jobs for which there can be debate indeed, such as train drivers and commercial plane pilots. This may seem unfair by today's standards to everyone else, but it really concerns only a very tiny portion of the active population (and thus has virtually no real impact) and frankly, as a passenger, I would be a bit nervous being in a train or plane driven by a 70+-year old. Just a thought. Besides, here, most train drivers don't retire at 55 anyway because even if it's still legally possible (it's actually over since the new agreements have been signed a couple days ago), most of them wouldn't get their complete retirement wage at this age. So most already don't retire this early, unless they are gently pushed out by their management willing to refresh the workers pool. Just an aside to instill a bit of reality. Again those seemingly priviledges may look out of place nowadays but I highly doubt removing them will solve anything. And as the age at which people start working is constantly increasing, a lot of people here in their 30's won't be able to retire before 67 or 68 anyway (and probably 70+ by the time they reach this age). The main problem of France IMO is that it's a gigantic tax monster that keeps businesses from growing and keeps most people from empowering themselves while pretending to help them (which kind of works by maintaining them in dependency).

Our retirement systems in Europe (and in most developed countries) are screwed up in many ways, this I agree with. Obviously they were built to work only for a generation or two post-WWII. And this is what has happened. After just one generation, they were already showing signs of weakness, and after the second, they have become almost unmanageable. But I'm not really sure having a lot more people on the job market will make the economy grow substantially enough to absorb this. It's very difficult to predict. I suggest looking at the current unemployment rate of the 55-64 people in EU alone. Some may believe that cutting retirement costs will make the overall economy grow so much that the unemployment rate will plummet even for older people, but it's wishful thinking. Young people will still have more energy and cost a lot less than old ones, so it's kind of hard to predict the difference in employment rate will tend to zero. Is it better to have a bunch of old people that are retired or have them unemployed and needing social welfare? Tough call.

Anyway, just a few thoughts. All of this to say that differences in competitiveness have more causes and implications than just the cost of labor. To get back to the german example, the cost of labor there is very significantly higher than the EU average (approx +30%) (even though it's indeed lower than France's by about 10%). There are obviously many other factors.

[IanMacdonald]

We need a new big nuclear powerplant, but we don't have any big enough location for it.

I think we should push ahead with fusion, and with thorium LFTR as a fallback.

That will silence the alarmists and give us the means to move on with technology. Instead of having to put the clock back a couple of hundred years.

Just read that Mumbai has introduced prison sentences for carrying plastic bags. No, not for littering the place with them, just for having them. 
I thought the plastic bag charge was a good idea since it promotes reuse, but now I'm not so sure. It may have been the small end of the wedge for something far more totalitarian. Beware the watermelons- Green on the outside, Marxist Red on the inside.

[Gyro]

£1.3bn Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project thrown out

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-44589083

We have some of the highest tidal ranges in the world and we can't even overcome government apathy to go ahead with a pilot project! 

No worries about the vagaries of sun and wind, it happens twice a day, every day and can be accurately predicted in time and level for hundreds of years.

[IanMacdonald]

True, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's an economic proposition.

The government seem to have gotten a bit wiser about such things (thankfully, at last) and check the facts these days before they subsidise.
 

[Gyro]

Sure but you've got to start somewhere, cost goes down with scale.

Just imagine the moving mass of water in the Severn Estuary [Edit: 15metre tidal range, second only to the Bay of Fundy in Canada. ]  We should at least be 'prototyping' on a realistic scale before going for a big one.

I'd prefer to see something renewable and sustainable like that than paying the large premium to EDF and the Chinese for power from the new Hinkley Point nuclear power station forever more. How many more are we going to 'rent'.

[Nauris]

It is a problem that the US is currently ignoring global warming, but chances are they will change there mind if the effects gets more obvious and international pressure will rise.  However the problem is that adapting late will be really hard - up to the point of a total economic disaster. There is a chance in adapting early as this would help your economy to be ahead. So the restrictions may not be such a bad economic idea, more like an investment in future technology.

But isn't late adapting the most economically viable way of adapting?

Like for example in Germany you have been building wind turbines since '80 at least. First small ones of 10's of kW size then 100' s kW and progressively bigger ones as you have gained more experience.
Vast amounts of money were used in research and development, even bigger amounts in building wind turbines that were bleeding edge technology when they were build but now superceded by more modern and economical ones.

Many turbines had to be scrapped or expensively repaired early in life because of unforeseen technical problems. Big manufacturing facilities had to be built, soon to be replaced by even bigger ones. Someones even tried to put them in sea in hope of higher winds at even greater expense.

But that was back then.

If we were to begin adopting wind turbines now, we would just get a turnkey project of 5 MW on-shore turbines at 7.5 M€ each from SiemensGamesa. All the bells and whistles included, erected in few months, pretty much guaranteed to be operational for decades to come. No fuss, no suprises, no R&D, just works.

Pretty much what happened here when they started building wind turbines about five years ago. If you are the late adopter, you can just buy the working solution.

[nctnico]

£1.3bn Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project thrown out

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-44589083

We have some of the highest tidal ranges in the world and we can't even overcome government apathy to go ahead with a pilot project! 

No worries about the vagaries of sun and wind, it happens twice a day, every day and can be accurately predicted in time and level for hundreds of years.

Not just that but put wind mills along the edge to pump extra water in the lagoon and/or use electric pumps. If you count in the use for energy storage then the numbers look completely different.

[Gyro]

Someone's going to end up as the go-to solution for tidal installations, just like Nauris mentioned for wind turbines. I'll lay odds that is won't be us though! 

I think you've got a fighting chance though - you've got a lot of the infrastructure already, even if you don't necessarily have the tidal range.

[tautech]

Okay, so it's only fairy tales by 2030 instead of suicide. It's still deplorable that government gets together for a big game of pretend.

It deplorable that collectively they haven't seen through this charade and instead been 'sold a pup'.
How the masses interpret/swallow all this is the interesting bit and what they they each endeavor to do to 'do their bit' to counteract 'climate change'.
I giggle at the ones on good salaries for example, airline pilots driving around in e-cars while they each burn tonnes of jet fuel every day ! 

[Kleinstein]

It is a problem that the US is currently ignoring global warming, but chances are they will change there mind if the effects gets more obvious and international pressure will rise.  However the problem is that adapting late will be really hard - up to the point of a total economic disaster. There is a chance in adapting early as this would help your economy to be ahead. So the restrictions may not be such a bad economic idea, more like an investment in future technology.

But isn't late adapting the most economically viable way of adapting?

Like for example in Germany you have been building wind turbines since '80 at least. ts in building wind turbines that were bleeding edge
 .....
If we were to begin adopting wind turbines now, we would just get a turnkey project of 5 MW on-shore turbines at 7.5 M€ each from SiemensGamesa. All the bells and whistles included, erected in few months, pretty much guaranteed to be operational for decades to come. No fuss, no suprises, no R&D, just works.

Pretty much what happened here when they started building wind turbines about five years ago. If you are the late adopter, you can just buy the working solution.

We paid quite a bit for the early wind turbines, but this helped that German companies are now at least among the big players. Chances are the early adapters are also those who get the leading technology.  It did work out well for wind power in Germany - it did not work out for solar however, as China spend even more money and has better conditions.

There is some risk in adapting early, but there is also a big risk in adapting late, as the changes get very rapid than and much of the investments are usually long term. So late adapters would have old technology to shut down early.

[nctnico]

Okay, so it's only fairy tales by 2030 instead of suicide. It's still deplorable that government gets together for a big game of pretend.

It deplorable that collectively they haven't seen through this charade and instead been 'sold a pup'.
How the masses interpret/swallow all this is the interesting bit and what they they each endeavor to do to 'do their bit' to counteract 'climate change'.
I giggle at the ones on good salaries for example, airline pilots driving around in e-cars while they each burn tonnes of jet fuel every day ! 

Well per person a jet is more fuel efficient than a car. Just look at the shape of an airplane and you'll see why.

[Kjelt]

Well per person a jet is more fuel efficient than a car. Just look at the shape of an airplane and you'll see why.

Only with a 50% full so half full booked plane or better 
Only exception was the concorde, also a very airodynamic shape but with over 16l/100km per seat fully booked not really economic.

[bd139]

Well per person a jet is more fuel efficient than a car. Just look at the shape of an airplane and you'll see why.

Only with a 50% full so half full booked plane or better 
Only exception was the concorde, also a very airodynamic shape but with over 16l/100km per seat fully booked not really economic.

Still likely less nasty than:

[Kjelt]

 
Everywhere on earth within an hour, yeah right.

I flew yesterday, checkin required to arrive two hours early:
Checkin, luggage checkin, customs, wait, boarding at gate entering plane: 2 hours 15 minutes

Flight took 3 hours 15 minutes

Checkout wait for luggage to arrive, bags, customs, airport:  1 hour

So efficiency 50%  wait time and protocol total three hours, flight time three hours total 6 hours.

[bd139]

Ignoring the being blown up, having to deal with zero G vomit and then drowning in the sea after it missed the pad of course...