this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Georgia governor calls for even more nuclear power despite budget woes (grist.org)
submitted 5 months ago by jeffw to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Georgia has every reason to be a solar powerhouse. They have sunlight to spare and every reason to want to build it. Batteries are finally getting cheap enough to outcompete fossil generation, too.

And they ARE building it, so they even are achieving learning curves on it. There are even Republicans on the PSC (Tim Echols) that are highly, highly pro-solar.

Meanwhile Georgia Power is currently planning more fossil gas plants and extending the life of a handful of coal plants because they think they have a shortfall in energy forecasts for future demands. Because, among other things, so many huge tech datacenters are moving to the state (which of course many were doing on the promise of the quite green grid Georgia has to offer, which was the bait that is now being switched on them).

Why? Because they're lazy, super conservative, and they get guaranteed profits off of capital investments. The Southern Company is one of the most powerful forces of great evil in the country and goes largely unnoticed. They are actively incentivized to fuck their own ratepayers in order to increase their profitability by the agreements and statutes that allow them to be the utility.

The reality is that Vogtle was built and we should be glad for it and use it. It's spun up and producing gobs of power, and will continue to do so for a damn long time. Great. But in a state where fossil production is still being actively expanded, putting money towards ultra-expensive nuclear over incredibly cheap solar and storage, betraying your own potential "customers" in the process, is just idiotic.