Protesters

[Churchlawtonblue]

I can answer in these terms: if we can’t answer the global warming question with any degree of certainty, then an over-abundance of caution would be highly prudent.

What do you recommend? Should we return to cave life. While China and India capitalise on fossil fuels?

 

[quiet_riot]

 

[Ban-jani]

What do you recommend? Should we return to cave life. While China and India capitalise on fossil fuels?

You believe green energy is cave life?

 

[grunge]

actual benefits. People die of cold in their thousands ever winter, and maybe some of them won't die.

Sorry mate but that’s a Trump level comment on climate change.

Even if it stopped fatal cold snaps ( it won’t ), you can simply shift that number x a few into the summer heatwave deaths.

General rule of thumb seems to be is the more heat in the climate the more violent the peeks and troughs in heat and cold will be. As well as more violent storms will be

 

[Churchlawtonblue]

You believe green energy is cave life?

Not exactly , slight bit of exageration . The point i was trying to make in a rather obtuse way was green energy wont replae what we have. It isnt capable.

 

[aguero93:20]

Not exactly , slight bit of exageration . The point i was trying to make in a rather obtuse way was green energy wont replae what we have. It isnt capable.

It'll have to be at some stage, at a base level every form of energy we have is derived from it, we're just using concentrated, but finite, stockpiles of it. It's also a bit cheap to say green energy isn't capable of fulfilling needs when we've barely begun to attempt to harness wind, wave and solar with the technology we already have, we're probably using <0.1% of what is available to us.

 

[Ban-jani]

Not exactly , slight bit of exageration . The point i was trying to make in a rather obtuse way was green energy wont replae what we have. It isnt capable.

It won’t.

We’ll have to make changes but the changes will make society and the wider natural world better.

 

[Armchair Supporter]

Not exactly , slight bit of exageration . The point i was trying to make in a rather obtuse way was green energy wont replae what we have. It isnt capable.

You are correct but it doesnt have to.

Just switching cars from Oil to Electric will make a massive difference and would not matter how you charged the batteries.

 

[Ancient Citizen]

We need to find a way of managing the human population down, but that will be far from straightforward, if not impossible in the medium term.

Which is what I've been saying, population control is possible, what isn't is what these people want.
An ever increasing world population is the fundamental reason for all of this, unless it's addressed, which it
could be, nothing will change.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Just switching cars from Oil to Electric will make a massive difference and would not matter how you charged the batteries.

Some perspective when considering electric cars:

Most of our electricity generation is still carbon burning. You burn oil, gas or coal, to heat water to generate steam, which drives turbines, which drive generators. The electricity is then transformed to high voltage for transmission. It's transmitted great distances, then transformed back to mains voltage at the substation. Back to the charging point, it's transformed again and then in your car it's converted to chemical energy in the battery. Then to actually drive the car, the chemical energy is converter to electricity again.

All if these conversations are lossy, i.e. some of the energy is lost as heat in every step of the process.

Vs generating the power needed right there in your car by burning the fossil fuel in situe and avoid most of the conversation steps.

Then you have to factor in the energy cost of producing and disposing of the lithium batteries.

Factoring all of these things, electric cars are still more efficient and are responsible for about 75% of the amount of C02 that petrol or diesel cars.. So if everyone switched tomorrow, you'd reduce CO2 output by around 25%.

All road transport accounts for about 15% of man made CO2 output. And that's lorries, vans, coaches, buses, cars etc. Cars are just over half of that around 8% or 9%. So changing all cars to electric would yield a 25% drop in ~8% of the output, i.e. a circa 2% overall reduction in CO2 output. Hardly "enormous" and that's if we switched all cars over to electric.

Of course as we generate more and more electricity from renewables, the savings would get better. If we could generate all electricity from renewables then cars would be around 67% more CO2 efficient, not 25%. And you'd be looking at a 5% or 6% drop in total CO2 output if all cars went electric.

But on cold still nights when we're at home charging our electric cars, we have hardly any renewable sources, so until we have a massive investment in nuclear, carbon burning will be the primary source of fuel for powering electric cars.