Technology

With respect, I think you're projecting a discussion with a different person onto this article.

You're right, the climate is going to get worse before it gets better. You're right, the impacts of climate change will disproportionately affect poor and underdeveloped areas. We can't make that go away with positive thinking, and it's not enough for humans as a species to survive, we need to focus on reducing suffering while we're turning the ship.

What I took away from this article is that the market forces for cheap renewable power and the means to store it are now stronger than the forces for CO2 emitting power. And those forces are moving faster than predicted. That's good, and it's ok to talk about something good when it's true!

People who have been paying attention and care about others have good reason to be wary about the narrative "oh, everything is going to be fine" because that's what industry and politicians have been saying for a long time instead of taking needed action.

We're at a point where most people recognize climate change is real, and they can see it's effects. We're also at a point where many people don't have hope for the situation. It's dangerous to tell people "shit's fucked and there's nothing you can do about it" because they might believe you and do nothing.

The problem is that we're not getting rid of the other stuff

We are, though. Coal use in the United States has cut in half in the last 15 years, and it's still on a steep downward slope. Even as natural gas (which emits roughly half the CO2 per unit energy as coal) increased over the same time period, our total emissions from energy consumption has dropped from about 6 billion tons to 4.8 billion tons.

The progress we're making might be slower than many of us would like, but we're also at a tipping point where we're making many fossil fuels simply uneconomical. And that's the key: to make polluting costly enough that big businesses won't want to.

As renewables becomes cheaper and easier to implement they will naturally supplant fossil fuel just by the nature of economics.

You're right, we've got to get rid of fossil fuel. As one example, the article talks about how energy storage has reduced the need for gas peaker plants. In California in April the power required from those plants was half what it's been in April the prior three years.

Still plenty of progress that needs to be made, but what's notable is that it's now cheaper for a business to turn to green energy and storage to solve a problem. There's not an incentive to build new polluting tech. So while the impact of climate change is going to get worse (because those emissions and warming are already baked in) the business argument for fossil fuel is no longer viable.

Yes, we need more storage and generation. The author didn't say we're all good and nothing more needs to be done. What's noteworthy is that renewable energy is cheaper than CO2 emitting, and battery storage is cheaper than peaker plants. (And grid battery can come from things like salt, sand, brick along with better known components like hydro storage, doesn't have to be rare earth elements)

It's ok to acknowledge when good things happen while also recognizing bad things.

True.

And while we wait we keep our factories running, our cars on the street, our planes in the air, our meat on the tables, our plastic wrapped around everything and keep believing that we will be just fine.

It doesn't have to be storage, another option is building over capacity so it's winter output is sufficient then using the excess in summer months to perform useful work.

For example a desalination and pumping station at the mouth of the Arizona River, you can scale the pumping from a storage lake by the desalination plant to one or more of the upriver lakes raising their water levels to replace the water used for industry and agricultural.

Carbon capture and manufacture of e-fuels or similar is another great possibility, it can be scaled with energy production vastly reducing the cost of the process and allowing further transition from oil in areas which might otherwise be difficult.

E-chems are important because there's a few things which are vitally important to modern industry but currently produced fairly cheep as an oil by-product, if demand for oil derived fuel declines as we hope and production falls dramatically then the price of those chemicals would skyrocket - being able to transition into using sequestered carbon would save a lot of difficulty, and if it helps create a market for sequestered carbon it could help us start bring atmospheric co2 ppm down slowly.

Grid scale storage has come a long way. There are saltwater batteries and flow batteries in use now, those technologies are here, they're just still being iterated on and improved. And as the renewables get increasingly affordable, the demand for storage will rise with it. Now we're still mostly deploying expensive lithium batteries, but as more of that gets installed, the demand for cheaper storage will skyrocket. And production generally follows demand.

until these get produced for real in mass quantities, they are vaporware

The world is already seeing exponential growth in annual completion of grid scale battery storage. Here's some recent data in the US, as products and projects mature from theoretical to small scale prototypes to full scale pilot projects to full production.

And author should compare winter moths

There's also significant developments being made in geothermal, which is actually dispatchable. Plus we actually still produce more grid-connected wind than solar right now, it's just that solar is so damn cheap it makes sense to install capacity well beyond matching peak demand.

Some combination of overcapacity, demand-shifting, and storage will go a long way in reducing the amount of dispatchable fossil fuel capacity that is necessary.

We would be, if not for Devo

Yes, technically I am.

• don’t cut back on planes, increase intercity train use
• don’t cut back on cars, create more walkability and transit
• dont cut back on meat, try this fantastic new meal that happens to not include meat, or fine: just one less day of red meat every week
• don’t try to avoid facism, stand on your constitutional rights (for us). There’s more to that doc than the second amendment

I don't agree with you, but also if I did, what then? If we don't believe it's possible for things to get better do we just lay down and die?

Doomerism like this is fucking stupid and definitely leads to the wrong thing, which is to do nothing. If we're already fucked, why even try? The truth is that IF we try, we very well might be able to avoid the worst. Which is worth fighting for.

A massive population correction is inevitable.

The world population is going to stop growing, naturally, within the next decades as the last populous countries finish their demographic transition. It's even going to see a reduction in many places unless steered against due to way below placement rate fertility. Long story short human fertility is intimately tied to child mortality: The fewer children die, the fewer kids we have, investing in quality over quantity.

The earth can easily sustain that population, even in a more fucked up state.