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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Ask Lemmy
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The oil and gas companies and their "environmentalist" buddies.
We could have prevented climate change with nuclear power in the 1990s.
Even without solar and wind (they were too expensive at the time) or carbon taxes, Sweden and France managed to get emissions down to 5 tons per capita with old nuclear and hydro technology. If all rich countries had done the same thing, climate change would have been a non-issue.
We can still solve it today with today's technologies: solar, wind and battery technology has evolved and become affordable. Carbon taxes are politically feasible. And old nuclear technology is becoming more acceptable and gearing up.
Sure, try to help by reducing your energy use where possible and investing in things like home insulation and energy efficient heating and transportation.
But the actual big things that need to be done can only be done by politicians, to force economies to change.
This is true and I'm not disputing this fact, but had the oil companies not interfered with and killed off any attempts at alternative energy sources, things may have been quite different.
I’m curious how mass nuclear energy adoption in the 90s would have offset the impact of agriculture, livestock, and the oil and gas industry. I don’t see how nuclear energy would have made climate change a non-issue.
Then you should do the math. If the rich countries all had achieved 5 tons per capita in 1990, then atmospheric CO2 would be around 380 today instead of 420. It was 350 back in 1990 and reached 380 around 2005.
Sure, we would still need to get to net zero, but we could have gotten there over many decades without ever hitting 1 degree of warming. That's what I mean with "climate change would be a non-issue"
Cool. I’ll just do the math then. I’m sure it’s just as easy as all those people on Facebook say doing your own research is. Sorry, I don’t mean to sound flippant about this, but fuzzy napkin math without sources or stats or some kind of methodology does not make a strong claim. Without that kind of specificity or rigor, we’re just two assholes on the internet misinterpreting each others’ words.
Anyway, totally agree with that second paragraph. And I’m certain there’s a ton of sources to back you up on being at 1990s CO2 levels. I wouldn’t personally consider a few more decades of wiggle room to be a non-issue, that’s just me. Though, looking outside my widow at the hellscape of 100% humidity and melting assault I sure wish we had invested more in nuclear energy.
Nobody is going to get published in academia with a "what could have been" article. But there were a great many models published back in the 1990s and early 2000s on how to stay below 1 degrees warming. Nuclear power was the backbone of those models.
The economist did publish a nice fanfiction
What if nuclear power had taken off in the 1970s? from The Economist https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2020/07/04/what-if-nuclear-power-had-taken-off-in-the-1970s
Neat! Thanks for the link.
Ammonia!
You see, a lot of the agricultural impact on CO2 concentrations on the atmosphere comes from industrial made fertilizers. Which is basically ammonia with a bunch of other things in smaller quantities. Despite being a natural product created by a ton of bacteria and organic processes, today almost all of the ammonia used by agriculture is produced by a chemical process that uses fossil fuels. Specifically extracting hydrogen from fossil fuel to then recombine it into ammonia. It also uses a lot of heat that comes from burning the fossil fuel. The thing is, we don't technically have to burn fossil fuels to make ammonia, there are other ways. But they require a lot of energy. However, if you have a lot of excess cheap electricity during low demand periods from nuclear power, for example, you can make cheaper ammonia and hydrogen. It's also cheaper and more efficient to keep a nuclear power plant rolling than to wind it up and down every day. So you can use the excess electricity to power or supplement other power hungry industrial processes like desalinization, hydrogen production, powering water reservoir replenishment pumping, etc.
This also offsets livestock production because a lot of livestock pollution is feed agricultural production. Almost half of agricultural production is for stock feed.
So, it would've helped, a lot, to have a non-fossil fuel energy source to feed a non-fossil fuel process path to fertilizers.
Wow! That is fascinating. Thank you for sharing.
Not in the United States, they're not. I actually work with politicians as a climate lobbyist and carbon taxes are a complete non-starter.
Batteries are not quite there yet. It's still quite a large investment to build massive batteries that can help small to medium towns for short periods of time. As an EE I'm hoping we make a breakthrough soon that will allow us to increase their energy density. Either that or move to different liquid fuels, which have an energy density advantage.