There is no such thing as an average or ideal climate.
While that may or may not be true, it's irrelevant to the issue at hand. My goal in reducing CO2 output is purely about protecting our YUGE investments.
So here's another way to look at managing anthropogenic climate change; thru the lenses of probability and cost benefit analysis.
The total stock capitalization of American businesses traded on the stock exchanges is $48 trillion. Someone on Quora calculated the land & resource value of the whole USA at $5000 trillion. So I don't think it's unreasonable to value US seaside land, buildings, & infrastructure at the very round number of $100 trillion.
If you are CEO of a $100 trillion corporation, and some of your people are telling you the whole thing could be flooded in 20 years or 40 years or whatever, what's the prudent thing to do? Answer: ask for cost benefit analyses.
This approach removes the whole "religious war" aspect of the question and focuses on insurance style calculations.
What are the cost estimates for protecting your $100 trillion from floods, and what's a reasonable probability estimate that the doomsayers are correct? The religious war approach pins those probabilities at 0% and 100%, but suppose you allow a 25% probability that the doomsayers are correct, or, alternatively, that they're only 25% correct (25% is just for the sake of argument; I'm not married to the figure).
With that assumption, you now have $25 trillion at risk, so what's the prudent amount to spend to insure that $25 trillion?
A quick google says homeowners insurance costs about $3300/yr for each $1 million of value. Scaling to $25 trillion, that works out to $82 billion per year, or a 12 year investment of about $1 trillion.
So there's nothing outlandish about a ten year one trillion dollar green energy plan, especially given that the plan includes plenty of jobs, infrastructure upgrades, and goods purchased from American businesses.
"CLIMATE DENIAL" is probably the most stupid concept ever to be adopted by people without a critical thought in their head. You cannot deny climate. Climate exists. North Pole, Equator, South Pole, and all points in between. From -60C to +31C on average. Climate has existed since atmosphere first formed over 4 billion years ago, and every day since then, it has changed. There is no such thing as an average or ideal climate. Todays climate is far from ideal. Look at the Sahara Dessert. !5,000 years ago it was GREEN, while New York was under a kilometre of ice. There is no one with an IQ above that of wet earth that denies the reality of climate or that climate changes. And there is not a scintilla of evidence that on a decadal scale that heatwaves are any more prevalent now than in the dustbowl days of the 30s.
there is not a scintilla of evidence that on a decadal scale that heatwaves are any more prevalent now than in the dustbowl days of the 30s.
Actually, there IS good evidence that heat waves are more common.
Across the globe, hot days are getting hotter and more frequent, while we’re experiencing fewer cold days. Over the past decade, daily record high temperatures have occurred twice as often as record lows across the continental United States, up from a near 1:1 ratio in the 1950s. Heat waves are becoming more common, and intense heat waves are more frequent in the U.S. West, although in some parts of the country the 1930s still holds the record for number of heat waves (primarily related to the Dust Bowl, which was exacerbated by the conversion of prairie to farmland).
And since we're talking about GLOBAL warming, let's bring in the rest of the world:
He's certainly headed in the right direction. Here's one clear path to reducing CO2 output.
Electric cars have a FAR lower lifetime CO2 footprint and a FAR lower lifetime energy footprint. Since energy correlates closely to dollars, it means electric cars hav a far lower total cost of ownership.
These graphs are for Vancouver CA in 2018, so energy costs are similar to the US; however energy is represented in megajoules - there are 3.6 MJ in a KWH, and 1 MJ = .37 horsepower hours. It assumes 150,000Km of travel over the life of the car, about 93,000 miles.
Lifecycle CO2 costs (these include extracting & transporting oil)
The world has 8,000 gigawatts of installed electricity generation capacity, according to the International Energy Agency. In theory, if the capacity ran 24-7 it could generate 69 million gigawatt hours of electricity annually.
The world consumed about 27 million gigawatt hours of electricity in 2019. That electricity warmed homes and ran businesses. What’s more, the world consumed the equivalent of roughly 28 million gigawatt hours of electrical energy to power its cars and trucks. That energy, of course, was stored in liquid fuel. Power plants didn’t have to generate it. Gasoline and diesel make most of the world’s vehicles go.
So 27 plus 28 is 56. The world needs 56 million gigawatt hours to keep the lights on as well as drive cars and trucks. There is 69 million gigawatt hours of capacity.No problem. But the generating capacity of wind and solar, of course, can’t be “on” 100% of the time. And even coal, nuclear, and hydro power plants have to take maintenance downtime. Still, there looks to be some spare generating capacity and the world’s 2 billion or so vehicles won’t convert to battery power all at once.
BTW, lithium batteries are great because they recycle so well.
Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined > Cathodes made with novel direct-recycling beat commercial materials 15 Oct 2021
And, lithium salts dissolved in hot geothermal wells has minimal environmental impact.
The new 'gold rush' for green lithium Geothermal brine could become a promising and sustainable source of an essential element for the renewable energy transition 24th November 2020
