China Cancels Over 100 Coal-Fired Power Plants (reuters.com) 278
In an effort to improve air quality, the Chinese government has canceled over 100 coal-fired power plants in 11 provinces -- totaling a combined installed capacity of more than 100 gigawatts. Reuters reports: In a document issued on Jan. 14, financial media group Caixin reported, the National Energy Administration (NEA) suspended the coal projects, some of which were already under construction. The projects worth some 430 billion yuan ($62 billion) were to have been spread across provinces and autonomous regions including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi and other northwestern areas. Putting the power projects on hold is a major step towards the government's effort to produce power from renewable sources such as solar and wind, and wean the country off coal, which accounts for the majority of the nation's power supply. To put it in perspective, some 130 GW of additional solar and wind power will be installed by 2020, equal to France's total renewable power generation capacity, said Frank Yu, principal consultant at Wood Mackenzie. "This shows the government is keeping its promise in curbing supplies of coal power," Yu said. Some of the projects will still go ahead, but not until 2025 and will likely replace outdated technology, he said.
Pleasant surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
I never believed China would be up to this. Great!
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It's nice to see a positive comment on Slashdot. For a change.
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Yeah, well .. . Trump.
Gonna make it harder to put all the coal miners back to work though.
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I think their pretty happy with the US's issues with TPP too. Personally, I have some huge issues with TPP of course...but it is a policy to restrict China trade-wise and even rumors of the US abandoning it has allowed China to do various maneuvering.
And if someone gets a little too frisky with China, and pulls some really dumb move, China owns something like a third of the total foreign held US debt. (don't hold me to that exact amount, suffice to say it is a Yuge amount)
Although China needs the US as badly as the US needs China, if we try to bluster our way into something stupid, just calling the debt will make for a rather unpleasant time as the world economy topples.
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And what the fuck are you afraid they are going to do? Threaten not to collect their repayment? Stamp their feet? Think, man. Debt is furnishing cash money in exchange for a paper promise. We've ALREADY been paid; they are left hoping we don't go tits up and they lose all their investment.
Now, if you wanted to observe that we have also sold off all our real
US debt holders (Score:5, Informative)
China owns something like a third of the total foreign held US debt
The amount of US debt China owns [cnn.com] is less than 10% of the total amount outstanding. Currently around $1.3 Trillion which is a big number but only a single digit percentage of the total debt. Most of the US debt is actually held by Americans. Of the $12.9 trillion chunk of debt owned by Americans, $5.3 trillion is held by government trust funds such as Social Security, $5.1 trillion is held by individuals, pension funds and state and local governments and the remaining $2.5 trillion is held by the Federal Reserve. Basically most of the debt is IOUs to the American people.
Interestingly Japan owns almost as much US debt as China does at $1.1 Trillion. But Japan isn't so scary so people gloss over that fact.
Although China needs the US as badly as the US needs China, if we try to bluster our way into something stupid, just calling the debt will make for a rather unpleasant time as the world economy topples.
China has no ability whatsoever to "call" the US debt. Treasury bonds don't work like that. China bought those treasuries to keep their currency exchange rate under control. Furthermore even if China wanted to get rid of their US denominated debt, they have absolutely no one else they can sell it to. There simply are no buyers for that much US debt at anywhere close to face value. If they hold a fire sale they absolutely screw their own economy in the process.
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Well, and what about MY pretty happ? That's what I want to know.
Or...perhaps you can't spell "they're"? Never mind....
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I never believed China would be up to this. Great!
They are also into recycling.
This announcement was made before. That way they can get double the credit for each single cancellation.
That sort of political trick is used just about everywhere though.
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I think there's more at work here than simply China wanting to mitigate climate change. A long with signalling that Beijing intends to champion free trade, it's my view that China is basically saying "America is about to abrogate its role as a world leader, so we're going to step into the breach." I'm not criticizing China's stances on global warming and international trade, quite the opposite in fact, but I'm not too sure I like the idea of the autocrats in Beijing replacing Washington DC as the focal poin
Incoming... (Score:2)
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According to this [wikipedia.org], while China was the largest single emitter in 2014 (at 29.55%), the United States was still the second largest at 14.95%. So, to put a pretty blunt point on it, you're either a liar or an idiot.
Frank Yu doesn't know what he's talking about. (Score:5, Informative)
To put it in perspective, some 130 GW of additional solar and wind power will be installed by 2020, equal to France's total renewable power generation capacity, said Frank Yu, principal consultant at Wood Mackenzie.
France has nowhere near 130 GW of installed renewable power generation.
Currently we're running near peak demand at 92 GW due to the horrible cold, we've got about 55 GW of nukes running flat out (5 reactors are off line for maintenance) and about 15 GW of fossils, 13 GW of hydro, 2.6 GW of solar and 2.6 GW of wind.
How many of the other figures in this article are bullshit?
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To put it in perspective, some 130 GW of additional solar and wind power will be installed by 2020, equal to France's total renewable power generation capacity, said Frank Yu, principal consultant at Wood Mackenzie.
France has nowhere near 130 GW of installed renewable power generation.
Currently we're running near peak demand at 92 GW due to the horrible cold, we've got about 55 GW of nukes running flat out (5 reactors are off line for maintenance) and about 15 GW of fossils, 13 GW of hydro, 2.6 GW of solar and 2.6 GW of wind.
How many of the other figures in this article are bullshit?
Indeed. Total generation capacity is 110GW. http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
You could maybe argue nuclear is renewable, making renewables 90GW, but 130 is an outright lie.
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The outcome doesn't follow the premise. Having costs for fuel storage and risks using current technology does not naturally lead to: Shut it all down we're moving to wind.
If it did you would have bought a bicycle instead of a car with seatbelts.
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You have that backwards, for whether you like nukes or not the current economic reality there is that replacing the old nukes with new news is unrealistic due to the huge capital outlays and long lead times. Small stuff can be financed a bit of at a time (and comes online in less than a year to start paying it's way) even if it adds up to costing far more in the end.
It's only where someone can tell the accountants to shut u
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You have that backwards, for whether you like nukes or not the current economic reality there is that replacing the old nukes with new news is unrealistic due to the huge capital outlays and long lead times.
This problem of the high cost of nuclear power lies mostly in satisfying the regulations put upon the nuclear power industry. Making the price of nuclear power cheaper than coal can be solved with a change in policy, a relatively trivial problem. Making wind and solar cheaper than coal is a technological problem, which is not trivial. Some of the problems with wind and solar are matters of physics, which cannot be "solved" in any real sense.
In reading the news lately I do see that there are likely big ch
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You really think it's unrealistic to replace 60 year old nuclear technology with something as simple an elegant as a windmill or a sheet of semiconductor with no moving parts?
Yes, I do believe it unrealistic to replace 60 year old nuclear technology with wind and solar power. There's two big reasons I believe this.
First, it's a matter of resources. Wind power takes ten times as much steel and concrete to produce the same power as coal or nuclear. I don't have the numbers for solar in front of me but I do
Re:Frank Yu doesn't know what he's talking about. (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider a grid and you'll be taken a bit more seriously.
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Are we still talking about France? Because it already has a grid. Basically the whole EU is one huge grid.
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First, it's a matter of resources. Wind power takes ten times as much steel and concrete to produce the same power as coal or nuclear. I don't have the numbers for solar in front of me but I do recall it being similar. Those windmills sit atop large steel poles anchored to large concrete pads. We can choose to put those resources into wind power or we can use those same resources, put it into nuclear power, and get ten times more energy in return.
This makes no sense. There isn't a shortage of steel or concrete. In fact, if anything there is too much steel at the moment and its driving down prices as it gets dumped.
And if we are talking overall cost, then windmills and solar PV are cheaper, so there is no question of monetary resources being better directed either.
Second, it's a matter of reliability.
You don't really seem to understand the needs of the grid at all, in terms of reliability. Wind and solar are actually more reliable than nuclear in one critical way - they tend not to fail
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You need to update your facts. Wind and solar are affordable now. The price of solar has come down quite a bit in the last decade. Lazard's levelized cost report [lazard.com] shows solar and wind as cheaper than nuclear.
"Base load" is still an argument, but it isn't relevant until solar and wind become a vast majority of the energy in a locale. You only need a small percentage of "base load" to cover some emergency situations. We have enough existing conventional energy that we don't need to build more.
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Superheated liquid metal is very reactive with water or moisture and creates hydrogen gas.
Which is why they take great care in keeping water from it. Seriously though, there are concerns about water getting to the liquified metal and it could be quite a problem if it got out of hand. I do recall that in an experimental reactor in Japan they had pools of liquid metal that were open to the air without much concern, the metal would form a "crust" that prevented further oxidation. This is much like a tarnish on a solid metal forming. This worked well in that Japanese reactor until a crane fell i
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You are right about the change in technology, just your basel
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Advances in IT are easy, that's why they've happened. Advances in power generation are hard, that's why they haven't happened.
We don't have the kind of batteries and capacitors that would be needed to store energy at off-peak times, when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
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Windmills look a heck of a lot nicer than a coal fired electricity plant.
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I like windmills too. I was just making a somewhat sarcastic response to the parent that said the windmills ruin the sight and I said coal plant because it was in my mind as the article was about them. I could have gone on a rant about how the parent was wrong about them being very expensive to operate and maintain and that they are noisy too. As to their visual elegance it's more of a personal opinion.
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Where by "regularly" you mean every 30-40 years? Or perhaps even longer.
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Germany planning to move away from nuclear power and replace it with wind/solar, not France.
France do plan to increase investments in wind/solar but there is no plan to reduce nuclear capacity. Shortly after the Fukushima disaster, french president Nicolas Sarkosy said quite clearly that nuclear power is here to stay. And there is no sign of a change of plan.
There are organizations that militate against nuclear of course. There are also significant delays and cost overruns regarding the EPR but none of thes
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This is progress. (Score:2)
While some my scoff and call this a worthless effort, I disagree! Could they do more? Of course... but so could everyone else! Changing energy generation for a large country is a monumental undertaking and you will always have the greedy who would rather stab their own child in the eye than lose a single dollar but this shows a large counter-investment is going into renewable power sources. It's depressing that there is so much resistance to this change but it's slow, steady and unstoppable. Even the i
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Only half true article (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting that the article makes no mention of China's plans to build more nuclear power plants.
Found this with a quick Google search:
http://dailycaller.com/2016/09... [dailycaller.com]
China intends to bring 58 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity into operation by 2020, up from the current capacity of roughly 27 gigawatts, according to World Nuclear News. China plans to follow this by getting about 10 percent of its electricity from 150 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2030, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?
There is a bias in all news. The bias is in not only what they choose to report but what they choose to leave out. I've begun to seek out news from places that wear their bias on their sleeve, that way at least I know what they likely chose to report and leave out.
Re:Only half true article (Score:5, Insightful)
Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?
They didn't mention it because it's not true and the parts that are true are misleading. The World Nuclear Association is basically the propaganda arm of the nuclear industry, so you wouldn't really expect anything else.
China had big plans for nuclear. Post Fukushima, it has massively scaled them back. They were talking about 240GW at one point, around 15% of their projected energy use. Yes, 15% was the highest goal, not exactly massive. Anyway, it's all been abandoned and reduced now, with approvals frozen and the reality of over-budget over-time current builds setting in.
Any way you look at it, China is moving away from both coal and nuclear towards renewables. Beyond the current short term plans for nuclear it looks like it will decline as a percentage of total energy generated.
I've begun to seek out news from places that wear their bias on their sleeve
Like people who take the World Nuclear Association's word for it... I appreciate what you are trying to do, but you are doing it wrong.
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"There is a bias in all news. "
There is even more of a bias in what gets posted by a certain editor.
China has an industrial economy and high population density, so reducing carbon by moving the baseload from coal to nuclear is an obvious path. They are also installing what solar and wind they can manage given the nature of their economy and, since these sources are factory-built with low upfront cost, the solar and wind are what we are seeing go online first. That is the source of all those breathless stori
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The peaks are a lot higher than base load.
You don't use nukes for peak capacity. If you have nukes you use them every second you can.
Based on those two bits of information that you should already have known but somehow failed to consider, how does that estimate look now?
There no point dumbing things down to a Star Trek view of energy since we do not have perfect batteries, the problem has to be considered in terms of m
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Since China does not have that much natural gas, load following will be up to that largest fraction of China's renewable generating capacity, which as in most other places is hydro:
http://www.ecology.com/2013/03... [ecology.com]
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When the construction dust clears, we will see a nuclear China with about 20% renewables.
Um... You do realize that China's plan before Fukushima was to reach about 15% nuclear, and those plans have been massively scaled back from 240GW to about 80GW maximum since 2011? All new approvals have been on hold since 2014.
Nuclear in China will be about 5% of total capacity by 2050, assuming it doesn't get scaled back even more.
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Wrong again. China has big plans for nuclear, including development of full-burnup technology in parallel with building current-generation plants. The primary impetus is their massive air pollution problem.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i... [world-nuclear.org]
The only effect that Fukushima had on the Chinese reactor program was a round of system-wide special safety checks.
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Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?
Because no one wants to read about nuclear power plants being built anymore.
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Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?
There is a bias in all news.
This is true, but a story not being about what you want to be about is not necessarily bias.
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Selective omission. It creates a false impression that the only replacement power is renewables without mentioning additional nuclear capacity that presumably will also make up for the loss of this coal power.
If I say "My family has decided to cancel spending on a new SUV as part of a focus on increasing use of bicycles and public transit and wean ourselves off of cars" it sounds like we're really going green.
However, the reality is we're not just cancelling the new SUV, we're also adding another compact c
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Omission could very well be because addition of nuclear power is not that important. If they replaced coal with diesel generators, that would have been a blatant omission. It seems that article is talking about reduction of coal (not contested) to reduce CO2 emissions (nuclear has large up-front energy consumption for concrete, but far less operational C02 costs) and pollution (possibly less problematic with nuclear in short term). Also summary talks about relying more on renewable power sources, but at lea
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It's not just hydro, some people put nukes under the banner of renewables as well. There may not be a lot of breeder reactors active today but they are a reasonable reason to put all nukes under that banner.
Don't blame me, I don't do it but I can see where they are coming from.
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Here's a news article from a few weeks ago:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja... [forbes.com]
Happier now?
I didn't say that nuclear power requires "special" mention, only that by leaving it out of the discussion the authors of the article show an anti-nuclear bias. Forbes claims that China's wind and solar growth cannot continue at this rate for long, the economics don't add up. Forbes also claims that if China is going to reduce its coal use by any meaningful amount it will be from growth in nuclear and hydro energy.
Reute
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Trump will build them (Score:2, Insightful)
Trump will build the 100 plants in the US.
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Because nuclear power is far too costly and takes far too long to construct. Even assuming there is never another Chernobyl or Fukishima, nuclear power cannot be justified based on cost alone.
Solar is good business (Score:2)
Now that Chinese companies have the lead in Solar panel manufacturing it makes sense for the Chinese to support their home industry rather than building coal plants and importing turbines from GE
power plants not entirely at fault (Score:5, Informative)
It's winter! Why is China covered with smog in winter and not summer? Warm and fuzzy environmental types would like to blame Big Business and Government, but is there another explanation?
The primary reason is that high sulfur coal is used to heat homes in winter. "Homes and small businesses that burn coal in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei contribute up to half of the air pollution in the region every winter, said Zhao Yingmin, chief engineer at the Ministry of Environmental Protection." http://english.caixin.com/2016... [caixin.com] - but note that burning coal is generally outlawed in cities. The bulk of home consumption is in rural areas, and in the North where it is cold.
"In rural areas coal is still permitted to be used by Chinese households, commonly burned raw in unvented stoves. This fills houses with high levels of toxic metals leading to bad Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). In addition, people eat food cooked over coal fires which contains toxic substances." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Linfen, a city in northern China's Shanxi province has suffered greatly from unbreathable air. Citizens were told by the local environmental minister that "70 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions comes from citizens' coal use." There is skepticism, yet it is clear that industrial pollution is not entirely responsible. http://www.sixthtone.com/news/... [sixthtone.com]
The seasonal differences in air pollution cannot be explained by the rather constant industrial use of coal. Large scale power plants are able to mitigate the offensive emissions somewhat. The difference that we see right now is due to millions of individual homes producing the worst kind of pollution.
Only for unharmonious areas of China. (Score:2)
Coal will still be there as expected, much to the chagrin of environmental activists.
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still wondering about the over 70+ coal plants they're building in foreign countries, as part of infrastructure for their outsourcing of manufacturing. if they're cancelling plants at home to outsource pollution that would be funny
Re:Catastrophic man-made global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
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Plants consume CO2 and H2O so of course you'll have more plants. Fuck this "citation needed" Wonkypedia shit. I
I asked for citations because I'm skeptical of your ideas. If you don't want people to accept your ideas, why post them?
https://phys.org/news/2013-07- [phys.org]...
You obviously didn't read your citation, which contradicts your assertion.
I'm still to hear one big negative factor of increased CO2 levels and global warming.
Explain how your ignorance is our problem.
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Go talk to northern Canadians and Alaskans. The frozen sea. Ice which should show up in October didn't show up until December and January.
In the US our winter is currently 20 degrees above normal.
And always. https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Catastrophic man-made global warming (Score:4, Informative)
I live in Europe near the arctic circle and the drastic changes in climate are very much visible here too. The winters are warm and summers are very cold. 20 years ago there was consistency in weather and now that consistency is somehow gone. It can be literally -25C one day and +5 the next.
another xkcd (Score:2)
The frozen sea. Ice which should show up in October didn't show up until December and January.
{...}
And always. https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
And another ob. xkcd [xkcd.com].
To quote the strip:
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So win-win.
Re:Catastrophic man-made global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
The weird thing about racists is the way they need to inject their views into unrelated topics.
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How could anybody think there was a racial component to random mention of "refugees" who like warmer weather? Really these could be refugees from Norway or Finland! I was shocked!
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Hint,
"refugees"
wasn't referring to UK asylum seekers
Re:Catastrophic man-made global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Because apparently last year was the 'hottest year on record', even though it was a very mild summer in the U.K.
Aaaaand what percentage of the earths surface is covered by the UK?
And nothing like the drought of 1976.
Was there a worldwide drought in 1976?
And 'since records began' means 'in the past 150 years', and the planet has existed for millions of years.
Aaaand for how many of those millions of years have we been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and disabling carbon sinks?
Re:Catastrophic man-made global warming (Score:5, Funny)
Aaaaand what percentage of the earths surface is covered by the UK?
Speaking as an Englishman: 100% of the important parts, plus Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
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Shouldn't you Birts be using solar, anyway, as I was taught in school that the sun never set on the British Empire?
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Eh, it I think we could stand to see Bognor slide into the sea and no-one would miss it. Especially not the people living there.
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Aaaaand what percentage of the earths surface is covered by the UK?
That's the "Looked out my window and it was cold this morning - Take that golbal warming douchebags!" theory that he's spouting.
Now that can be of some utility. For instanceI can note that it was a fairly cold winter two years ago here in the Northeast of the US. Okay.
But the part of interest is that the other 15+ winters this century have been warmer than normal. That's a lot more interesting than "soundbite" weather.
If I wanted to play the UK denier's game I would note that I was outside doing ya
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Er, the planet has existed for 4.5 BILLION years. There have been at least 5 major ice ages in geological history. The last one was from 110,000 to 12,000 years ago. We are currently in the early stages of an inter-glaciation period.
The period of contemporary scientific research and record-keeping, as correctly pointed out, at about 150 years, represents about the last 0.000003% of planetary existence. If the existence of the earth were represented by the 1281 pag
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What does climate from 4 billion years ago have to do with anything? In fact, what does climate from even 100,000 years ago have to do with anything? Human civilization has evolved within fairly narrow climactic constraints. It did not arise in the Carboniferous epoch, nor did it evolve in Paleolithic. So what exactly is your point?
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The yearly frost has been killing vermin for ages in North America and Europe. As the frost line moves upwards, as USDA "zones" creep northwards, so do these creatures.
Often these creatures are "invasive" the native plants have no defense against these bugs. For example stink bugs have existed 200 miles south of Mason-Dixon line for centuries without serious issues. When the climate became pleasant enough to inhabit pockets no
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Tell me again why should developing countries in the Global south complicate their industrialization so that lifestyles and ecosystems can stay the same in the rich Global North?
If you want to fight Global Warming because currently your country is on top climatically speaking but not sure what would happen in a changed world you should pay developing countries in hard cash to adopt measures which complicate their industrialization.
Just asking them to do it from the goodness of their heart is being disingene
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What's your problem really?
We know how humans affect the climate and we know it's affected.
What's the reason to disbelief?
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Driving a 5mpg gas guzzler is one, for example.
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What's your problem really? We know how humans affect the climate and we know it's affected. What's the reason to disbelief?
Some people don't want to have to give up a few luxuries or profit-making concerns on the off-chance that it'd force our descendants to live on an Earth that will resemble what Venus looks like today. The believe that if climate change is a thing, they can deal with it.
If it can be dealt with.
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Perhaps, perhaps not. Venus is still very poorly understood. In its high temperature environment its conditions are largely self-sustaining (preventing the sequestration of CO2 in rock), although it's also unstable, prone to broad temperature and pressure swings. It also appears to have undergone a global resurfacing event about 300-500mya, if that gives a clue as to how unstable the planet as a whole is. ;) We don't know what caused it, or really anything about it. Part of the planet's properties are
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This is going to be awfully complex so pay close attention.
"I don't like it therefore it is not true"
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You're not very persuasive, because your points are stupid. Sorry.
though it was a very mild summer in the U.K
All that is required to dismiss your ignorant, dumbass opinion.
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More like China-made global warming.
They make the bulk of everything else, so why not this?
Re: Catastrophic man-made global warming (Score:2)
How about don't use air conditioning in the first place (and in winter??), before you complain about China trying to supply power to its populace at all? Sounds ridiculously wasteful.
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Renewable energy in China (Score:4, Informative)
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You seem to take issue with corruption in particular. Authoritarian regimes are rather prone to this and China is no exception.
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Chinese government officials announced that they are getting really pissed off with the smog.
Then they should arrest it.
In both senses of the word.
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Per area doesn't really matter with electricity (Score:2)
Did you really forget the whole ridiculous "freedom fries thing" where Saddam was supposed to have been supplied with Uranium by the French out of their former colony of Niger
Re:Saving the world with a Tax. (Score:5, Insightful)
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A CO2 tax makes pollution more expensive. The tax won't make anything "greener" on its own. But set the tax sufficiently high, and suddenly windmills (or whatever) saves money on the now expensive energy.
I have a few questions for you. What do you think windmills are made of? This isn't a trick question either. The answer is that a large portion of the costs in windmills is in the steel, aluminum, and concrete. What do you think happens to the price of these materials if CO2 output is taxed? The way concrete is produced now includes the reduction of limestone to lime by heating it. This heat is often from natural gas or coal. The reduction of the limestone releases CO2.
Aluminum also produces a lot of
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It's possible to impose a revenue-neutral carbon tax, by reducing other taxes. (I'd recommend reducing the taxes that affect the poor, since they'll be hardest hit by a carbon tax.) A revenue-neutral carbon tax would leave just as much money available for investment, and would make investment in renewable energy more profitable.
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Which is why you spread your green energy generation across the grid - just like you do with coal or nuclear power!