Global warming forecasts

I would not say that engineer’s skepticism is evidence of anything. Evidence needs to be tangible.
I would agree that engineers are skeptical on this issue. I believe that what they want is to NOT be told that;

1) It’s settled science so don’t ask questions
2) It’s too complex for you to understand.
3) My conclusions from limited data and secretive modeling are the only possible answer

To engineers, this is the farthest thing possible from science. Engineers should be the easiest profession in the world to sell climate change to. If the lines lined up and the gaps were reasonable filled, the engineering profession would have been on board en masse years ago.

 

They're not flooding anything. We currently have a 100% tariff on them, soon to jump to 120%. Yeah, they'd love to dump them on us at $5-7K/vehicle, but we aren't going to allow that. . . for obvious reasons (see my post above).

 

Various points:

first about half of Democrats support expanding nuclear compared to 2/3 of republicans. The gulf between the two isn’t as large you indicate. The delta for fracking and offshore drilling is much larger.

Growing share of Americans favor more nuclear power

Plus it isn’t like there are completely unfounded fears with nuclear. Humans tend to have an aversion to unpredictable low probability but extreme consequence events.

The big problem with nuclear is cost. In order to decrease that extreme tail risk, the safety costs goes way up. The reason nuclear has not expanded is it hasn’t been commercially viable. As to the new smaller models, they have yet to be proven also. For the record I am all for pursuing and subsidizing these.

https://www.reuters.com/business/en...s-agree-terminate-nuclear-project-2023-11-08/

As to your point both sides are tribal, yes, but that confirms my point. It doesn’t negate it.

years ago liberals were more likely to be antivax than conservatives. The Covid vax came along and it flipped. Now many liberals in places like Marin county, a hotbed of prior antivax activity, became some of the highest level of vaccinated for the COVID vax.

Yeah, both sides. So what? This isn’t a contest of who is better. It is discussion of a particular issue.

 

You keep posting these generalizations and perceptions but are either completely unwilling or unable to address the core tenants of the basic science.

It is curious that you think the engineering profession is a better evaluator of climate science than those scientists who have actual backgrounds in that field of study.

 

Democratic vs. Republican occupations

This was pretty interesting. Actually most traditional engineering fields are reasonably balanced between republican and democrat, maybe a slight rightward lean, and environmental and software engineers have heavy left lean.

 

Agreed, I' was just making the point that it goes both ways and takes on an almost religious quality. It's not surprising that more Americans favor nuclear, but there are still power brokers in the D party who are very married to that post-China Syndrome rhetoric to this day.

If climate change is as serious as advertised, then the only way to tackle it is with an any-and-all approach, which politics seems to eschew due to existing loyalties. For instance, who is arguing for better ICE engines and/or hybrids? We're going to need at least a bridge solution for the developing world and that would seem to be a more realistic path than blanketing sub-Saharan Africa with Teslas.

 

Not really. The large scale of nuclear is one of its problems, due to a lack of flexibility. There has been a ton of R&D spent on nuclear. It hasn't solved the problems.

I would argue that you don't see a massive anti-nuclear right now heavily because no utility even wants nuclear. You spoke about transitions in a later post, which I will also address, but nuclear is a ridiculously bad transitional technology due to its cost structure, in which a massive upfront cost causes technological lock-in. Add in the lack of flexibility and huge overall costs, and it isn't a good solution to a utility.

I'm not opposed to DOE funding of nuclear R&D, but that hasn't been as successful as the R&D around wind, solar and batteries.

 

I’m talking about their own domestic energy supply. They are creating much more than the US

China's Dominance in Renewable Energy Expansion Continues | OilPrice.com

Why are they doing that? Climate change? I doubt it. Probably more like energy independence, increasing domestic supply and also reaction from their citizenry to the extreme levels of air pollution.

Having said that they expanding fossil fuels and coal too. It’s all about increasing their supply.

You have at least a partial point here, but I’m not sure I buy your assertion that the creation of panels makes the industry just a dirty. The real gains in solar are the utility scale solar efforts. While there may be some initial carbon deficit, after that energy is really low cost and practically no pollution. The more it expands the lower that initial deficit becomes. Also these panels become more efficient every year with technology.

So will the conversion to solar and wind make a difference in the climate change path over the next couple of decades? It’s hard to say, possibly not. But they absolutely move towards cleaner and cheaper energy, an expanded energy supply and more energy independence.

You have a fair point is the biggest danger of expansion into green energy is right now the supply chain is heavily skewed to China.

What is interesting is if we truly thought that climate change was the biggest issue, we would be buying all of those cheap Chinese EVs instead of keeping them out via tariffs and expanding the electric fleet much faster. But obviously even among most democrats domestic economic and national security concerns rate higher than theoretical climate change mitigation.

 

I totally agree with all that.

I think you exaggerate much of the Democratic parties motives. Most support an all inclusive approach. For all their rhetoric oil and gas drilling expanded under Obama and Biden. The IRA included incentives for gas and drilling.

As to Africa it would seem to me that Chinese EVs that cost about half as much as ours, in combination with utility scale solar would make a lot of sense.

 

I'd argue that we don't need a bridge solution for the developing world, in the same way that there was no bridge solution to a mobile phone network. Many developing countries struggle to maintain a supply of gasoline, leading to common shortages. As electricity becomes more decentralized, they can build an electric network easier than they can build the infrastructure and pay the continual costs on gasoline. In network environments, such as the type of car, there often isn't going to be a bridge solution. They may essentially leapfrog from two-wheelers to electric two-wheelers and, eventually, cheap electric cars. They won't be teslas. Byd seems like they are in prime position right now to supply this market.

 

I guess it's dammed if you, dammed if you don't on that last point. Exactly why reshoring is probably the No. 1 issue we need to deal with right now. I don't trust them and I don't trust current electric tech (specifically batteries) as being anything but another bridge tech. There's the other rub that, in order to go full electric, we'll have to expand mining by a factor of 10. That's not really environmentally friendly (and threatens things like fresh water supplies), so what we're really looking at is a tradeoff at best.

My understanding of solar is that it needs to be in preferred climate zones to be truly effective. Based on that, it should be ubiquitous in the Southwest, etc. The problem is when you think it's a solution in a place like the NE, or Germany. And, again, that's politics, not common sense.

And you're spot on re. CCP's motives. Let's put it this way, if they attack Taiwan, they immediately lose 60-70% of their energy imports and a lot of other key inputs. Nothing the CCP does is for any purpose other than cementing/increasing the CCP's power. It's the singular motivator of all their actions.

 

Look at China. They are not constrained by partisan politics. They do whatever they want regardless of what the citizenry wants - for the most part.

New nuclear in china over last 10 years has been 40 GW

China continues rapid growth of nuclear power capacity - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

China has 340 GW of new wind and solar under construction, more than 8 times the new nuclear of the prior decade.

China's Dominance in Renewable Energy Expansion Continues | OilPrice.com


Also it was the Trump administration who essentially killed the Bill Gates funded venture to build new small nuclear plants at a large scale

https://www.reuters.com/article/tec...estrictions-on-china-deals-wsj-idUSKCN1OV1R6/

They had gone to China because there was no way in the US that they could expand it at a large enough scale to make economic sense.

 

Do you have any proof of this? Because I find it hard to believe that building an electric network in the Sahel is some easy task. And it appears there is some kind of gasoline network already in place, however rudimentary. Maybe, again, the solution is hybrid. Specifically, plug in hybrids. But you're still going to need ICE to get there as electric networks take time to build.

 

True. I'm falling for the domestic media trap. Ironically (given the rhetoric of the dipshit crowd) Today's D's are probably closer to the R's of the 80s than anything.

 

This has been my point - I think Ds are mostly stepping away from their ideological fringe elements and trying to appeal more to centrists, whereas Rs are generally doubling down on MAGA and their extremist elements.

 

If you look at the actual policy, it's pretty clear. Still, they have to virtue signal to those types, which the usual suspects take to the most ridiculous extreme. Describing the current administration as Communist or Anti-Energy is laughable.

 

I linked one in the Sahel earlier, specifically in Ethiopia, involving electric vehicles. They are utilizing government policy to push the change, but they have a ton of power from hydroelectric and limited gasoline, providing them the incentive to push the change.

I think a decentralized network with less up-front cost is much better suited for unstable regions, due to the lower need for major infrastructure projects (which are hard in unstable regions). You see numerous programs that are starting to push this solution in the region (led by the African Development Organizations, the UN, the EU, and the French and British governments). They have each been announcing a ton of projects. Burkino Faso just announced a large project, although, the smaller scale projects are probably more attractive as a whole.

Burkina Faso to build $53m solar plant, largest in the Sahel region | Africanews

 

Nice start, but again, is there no use for better ICE and/or hybrid? Especially in the short term? Again, why does it always have to be one thing at the expense of everything else? I'm guessing we're still talking a decade for best case scenario, right?

 

If it is indeed a result of tribal affiliation, which I find plausible, it’s a problem that cuts both ways. If engineers are only skeptical of the climate because they lean to the right, it could be that biologists only accept climate science because they lean to the left.

The precision hypothesis is interesting as well. Indeed, the climate is a messy affair that will never lend itself to engineering specifications.

 

Or maybe biologists accept it because it is widely accepted and understandable science. One really has to jump through intellectual hoops to dismiss the basic premise of human caused climate change.

If a biologist or anthropologist accepts evolution theory it isn’t because they are liberal it’s because it’s a well known, accepted and demonstrated scientific theory.