77% of Top Climate Scientists Think 2.5°C of Warming Is Coming—And They're Horrified | Common Dreams
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"I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South," one expert said.

“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one expert said.

  • dgmib@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.

    The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.

    Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.

    Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.

    Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.

    Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.

    The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.