This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Do they believe this? What’s going through their heads? Is it just vibes?
There are two(2) ways to run a power grid without particularly fortuitous geography a la Iceland, Switzerland, Norway. Nuclear and fossil fuels. That’s it. Renewables just aren’t reliable enough.
There is build 2x capacity and use fossil fuels when you are getting insufficient solar and wind power.
Which is why the vast majority of new US power infrastructure consists of natural gas turbines, because the only time the sun shines (and to a point, the only time the wind blows) is when you don't actually need the power and no other workable storage solutions exist.
Since the only output from the turbines is... CO2 and water [and methane is arguably the cleanest gas in terms of CO2 to burn, given its outsized amount of C-H bonds anyway], there's no visible plume coming out of the stack and very few other contaminants to visibly wreck the surrounding area (SO4), so most environmentalist complaints about them ring hollow to the general public. Much like cars themselves, come to think of it, especially when everything's already a hybrid anyway.
My memory that opposition to methane burning is more about leakage than anything about the plant or process itself. Of course, it is much better than coal, which is pretty bad. Methane, as you may know, is ~28 times more potent as a greenhouse gas then CO2, so small leaks can add up. However, I haven't looked at analyses on whether natural gas alone is or isn't sufficient for meeting Paris goals. My suspicion is no, but I could be wrong.
Hybrids still don't have full market penetration even among new cars. I'd be much more amenable to making hybrids required, rather than this electric-or-bust current policy. Unfortunately, they are still more expensive than traditional gas powered cars.
Still I quite like nuclear. Makes me wish the gen-4 reactor research funding wasn't so spotty and late.
I suspect that methane leaks are basically not real, and the meme probably driven by some research paper with either shoddy methods or a narrow application.
I happen to have two gas meters on my property. One connects to appliances in our house, the other to a heater for my pool. I use the heater maybe twice a year. During the months it is not used, there is zero movement on the meter.
Valves, joins, cracks, corrosion and wear in protective coatings. Keep in mind that the transportation methods used in your house very, very likely do not scale the same to industrial production and distribution. Pressure is fundamentally different, volume matters, square cube law stuff, different types of oversight and accountability regimes, etc all make for potentially a quite different product (I'd say your "but my house" comparison is akin to people comparing a household budget to the US government's budget -- there are some pretty key differences and assumptions that change, like the whole taxation and money supply aspects). Also, a gas leak is less likely in a carefully-tracked, very small segment of the overall distribution network involved, and furthermore leaks are frequently fixed when found, while the same paradigm might not exist on a large-scale gas line! Now, to be quite fair, it's probably a good assumption that brand new plants and pipelines to support them would be less prone to leakage, but more construction-related accidents are also possible to offset this, so it's not an ironclad assumption. Keep in mind when a new natural gas plant is opened up, there's the plant itself, but also pipelines and transport of gas to feed it, and furthermore a possible net increase in gathering and production lines, which might have their own leaks. So yeah. It might also depend a little bit on timeframe -- a new plant will have newer methods and pipes, but at some point the plant will grow old! The question then becomes, how careful are the regulations and monitoring?
Biased source, fair warning, but here you can see a large report on the issue. They apparently did some legwork and tried to verify EPA estimates and found the EPA numbers to be a significant under-estimate. Some of existing pipelines are quite old, and clearly not monitored that extensively, so to some extent perfect data on some of these aspects do not exist. They give one example that for some types of pipeline only 7% of the length is actually monitored at all! Also, you claim not to have a leak at your house, but one of the methodologies used was data gathered directly from Google Street View vehicles. In 12 metro areas at least, they had sensitive gas meters on them, so they used this data alongside some other sources to find that some leaks seemed to definitely be occurring, in aggregate.
Overall I find a dismissal of methane leaks as not real does not seem to match this data at all, even the EPA numbers. Note that even the EPA numbers are equivalent to (on a 20-year time scale, where methane is 100x more potent than CO2, vs the aforementioned 28 on a 100-year scale) over 6 million cars on the road for a year, and the org above thinks the real number is actually equivalent to 23.5 million cars on the low end and 50 million cars on the high end.
Seems like a bit of a streetlight effect to me. These infrastructure leaks are likely tiny compared to methane generated by ordinary organic processes. Their high-end estimate of about 2.5 million tons is as compared to an estimated 570 million or so tons annual emissions, of which 40-50% is from single-celled organisms and most of the rest from agriculture and oil production. Since infrastructure leaks already come directly off the bottom line of the service providers, it seems likely to me that resources would be better utilized elsewhere than trying to reduce this number to zero. The simplest solution, if you want people to stop demanding natural gas service to the home, is to permit enough electrical generation to make electricity cost-competitive, but electricity rates are rising faster than inflation, providing pressure in the other direction.
From the point of view of the government, it's simpler to let them keep demanding but just say "no".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If these numbers are correct, then natural gas actually has a significantly greater impact on greenhouse gas release than lignite coal (which does not leak into the atmosphere and has about twice the CO2 factor when burned as methane, whereas leaking methane is about 28 times the greenhouse gas impact as burning it). Would you, then, support going back to coal (with all modern scrubbers and other pollution control technology) as much as possible until such time as this leak problem has been solved? Would anyone producing these numbers?
If not, I submit they do not actually believe these numbers. They are merely a weapon to be used against fossil fuels.
You are actually correct! Great intuition following this to its logical conclusion. NYT description of recent study you might find interesting which also has some good links about natural gas leaks. Were climate activists misled? Yes, partially! Note that clean coal technologies have improved over the last few decades, and traditional coal was a classic and convenient boogeyman because of the visceral and visual aspect. At the same time the data involving methane leaks was insufficient and caused climate activists to make some bad assumptions. We shouldn't be too positive when it comes to coal, however, because greenhouse gasses are a big issue, but so is pollution, and coal is traditionally much worse about pollution. The two concerns don't always dovetail. Cost and the most efficient use of resources including money also looms over everything, too. This is the case in other related areas, as well! In my home state of Oregon, they've been destroying a couple of hydropower dams for other environmental and/or so-called environmental justice reasons (native tribes, fishing, etc) even though I personally (and some portion of dedicated climate activists as well) strongly oppose these choices since hydro is so incredible as a power source! So those are all potent reasons I'd be hesitant to accuse broad Green efforts of bad faith -- there are some genuine tradeoffs, and tech is constantly changing! Plus, a lot of people are (rightly) skeptical of fossil fuel company claims and arguments, because those same companies also have a (very, very strong) history of bad faith arguments as well as outright lying, both in the greenhouse gas realm as well as the pollution realm. I think these energy companies are improving, but slowly. The incentives are just very skewed.
Overall, the Green movement is a bit slow sometimes, but I wouldn't be surprised if as you say, clean coal becomes the new recommended so-called "bridge" recommendation. And in fact, there is some movement to do exactly what you suggest doing, which is step up data collection and analysis of leaks, and re-consider what to do as we seek to complement renewables, and presumably attempt to eventually do pure renewables.
I found this analysis and discussion to be highly interesting. Politics creeps into everything. That's not necessarily a bad thing, politics is just the natural human way of trying to sort through our different priorities, and subject to manipulation by those with power in all its forms. I think the conclusion is to accept the complexity of our world and the issues, rather than rail against everything as a tribalist and one-dimensional manipulation effort. It's not Crazy Greens vs Big Oil, existential battle, with everyone stuck in between. So to answer your question, yes, I'm actually totally amenable to going back to "clean coal" for a little while, and I suspect most Greens might start to feel similarly over the next 5 years as well. It's really a huge optimization problem, where you're trying to find some stable balance of greenhouse/warming timeline (tipping point climate arguments, current favor of a 20-year timeframe over longer ones), money efficiency (using existing infrastructure, cost of energy to consumers, effectiveness of federal incentives), pollution and health concerns (short term risks, longer ones like cancer, environment stuff, wildlife sometimes), technology advancements (can we predict what the final power generation mix looks like, can we mitigate the bad stuff, etc) and political feasibility (how cooperative are corporations, how persuadable are voters, how educated are lawmakers and the public).
On balance, it's probably actually a bad idea to trade less methane for more CO2, because methane remains effective for a far shorter time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Germany is the only country which believes in climate change.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't have any particular knowledge of methane infrastructure, but I am an engineer with some relevant general knowledge.
You are incorrect.
Leakage is an unavoidable part of any fluid system, and the larger the system, the more leakage you can expect. Shit leaks, especially on an industrial scale. Your domestic gas lines are very small and minimally manipulated, gas systems in industrial systems are very large, involve lots of things that can break, and are manipulated regularly.
More options
Context Copy link
The leaks are mostly from production facilities, not local distribution.
The EPA estimates leaks at ~1%. There's studies out there estimating them at 9%. The amusing thing is that at about 3.5%, you might as well be burning lignite coal -- at 3.5% you're leaking as much CO2-equivalent as you are burning, and lignite coal has roughly twice the CO2 factor as natural gas. So if we're really leaking 9%, we'd be better off (from a CO2 perspective) burning coal by a large margin. Of course you're probably right and the leak thing is likely just a bogeyman.
Plus, coal-burning provides the benefit of an insolation-reducing and thus planet-cooling sulfur layer! Not that I'd recommend it, personally, over direct sulfur injection.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the problem with "but muh costs" is that most people miss the intangibles about having and encouraging nuclear know-how and research. There's enough commercial incentive to come up with better batteries; but not for more interesting and novel fission designs, and chemical energy storage is ultimately a dead-end anyway since you just can't cheat electrochemistry. (Also, lack of sun due to massive volcano eruption, or to a much lesser extent wildfires, means solar isn't actually bulletproof either.)
I also think that's what the US (and formerly, the Soviets) get right in terms of military-industrial investment. The French nuclear build-out was kicked off under martial law for a reason, because it wouldn't have happened without de Gaulle noticing the tactical situation that was, and is, that the US does not generally act in Europe's strategic interests (which would come to a head with oil in 1973, and natural gas in 2022).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Biden's newest energy regulations are going to make new natural gas plants infeasible, however.
Yes, because we can't have Red areas getting rich from shale gas production (much as we can't have Red areas prosper when nuclear generating stations are located in them).
Which is... probably part of why the current build-out is so overwhelming.
Uh, where do you think those wind subsidies wind up?
New Jersey. Though our governor seems to have managed to screw that up.
I assure you, the owners of corn fields measurably boost their bottom lines by rents from subsidized wind farms.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, the third (3rd) way is degrowth. Affordable and reliable energy is not a human right, it is a construct of white supremacism and colonialism which doesn't take into consideration climate justice and accountability to the stakeholders.
That's not an option.
It's something that a handful of radicals talk about on the internet, mostly alongside extreme ignorance of the effects of any of the policies they symbolically recommend, but it has no purchase with the actual electorate.
As Ashlael notes, Australians care about energy prices. Energy prices win (or lose) elections, and if the Australian public feels the pinch of energy costs, or worse, starts feeling a measurable decrease in standard of living, they will turf out any government that seems responsible for it.
Climate change activists have been complaining about this for a long time, actually - the moment it hits the hip pocket, the public always pick side "lower prices, worry about climate change later". We're willing to vote for lower emissions and growth, but we absolutely will not vote for lower emissions at the cost of growth.
Degrowth is dead in the starting gates. It's not happening.
Ironically, I think the combination of left-wing policies actually makes it less likely, not more - the white-supremacism-and-colonialism argument only has appeal to liberal middle-class white people who feel a sense of collective guilt. However, as Australia becomes more ethnically and culturally diverse, that means that guilty white people will only come to make up less and less of the overall population, and have less power as a voting bloc. Chinese or Indian migrants largely do not respond to arguments about white supremacism or colonialism or historical injustices, for hopefully obvious reasons.
More options
Context Copy link
This is of course retarded and will lead to populists who end emissions regulations getting elected.
Like seriously, concern about climate change will not survive the first wave of blackouts.
Not if they ensure all such populists are excluded from the ballot.
More options
Context Copy link
This has, in fact, already happened.
More options
Context Copy link
When the blackouts start, they'll blame wreckers who refuse to conserve.
More options
Context Copy link
Longer term yes. But true believers can cause enormous damage now while we await the populists.
Especially not if the true believers harden the country's institutions against democracy. As some people are doing in preparation for the return of Trump.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They're right in that mixing nuclear and renewables is pointless. The median electricity price produced by renewables can be too low for nuclear to be cost-compeitive even while the average price is extremely high. That's why simple gas turbines make so much money off of renewable intermittency.
Every afternoon where solar overproduces to the point energy costs are "negative" is time a nuclear plant is losing money, and nuclear doesn't have the variable/surge capacity to make up for it on the cloudy winter days when people will buy energy at any price. (I have some graphs of that from last winter if you're interested)
The key to making nuclear successful is capacity markets or long term contract pricing, neither of which we can have because they would destroy the artificial wind market.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link