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by melling 1056 days ago
“But most importantly, we don't have time”

“Look at the arctic and ocean temps, we do not have time.”

“Again, we do don't have time for the most efficient solution.”

Yes, we squandered 45 years not doing obvious things and waiting for the batteries to improve, etc.

However, I sort of take issue with the “it’s too late to do things the right way”

We can stop burning coal. We are all time highs globally.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/12/16/world/coal-use-record-hig...

2 comments

Do you have any sources of anyone waiting for grid-scale batteries 45 years ago? Batteries for the grid only started being a thing relatively recently. I am not ready to write them off without giving them more time to figure out scale and economics.
> We can stop burning coal.

This illustrates that a big part of the problem is political, not economic or technological.

We have the technology and money to get to nearly 100% renewables (we'd likely keep some non-renewable fallbacks in place) in a fairly short time... hell, we could be there already.

But the coal industry is a powerful political lobby -- both the executives and workers who don't want to lose their jobs -- and so coal sticks around.

Coal is dying fast in the US. It’s international coal use (India and China) that is the problem. The coal lobby has nothing to do with that.
The US coal lobby is fighting for more domestic infrastructure for shipping coal internationally. That would lower the price of coal, thus increasing demand and consumption.

https://oaklandside.org/2022/02/03/6-year-battle-over-propos...

Stupid me, I assumed coal was so cheap and globally abundant that shipping it internationally would not make sense.
Shipping is just surprisingly cheap.
Especially out of the US, since containers are mostly empty
After fucking over Canada on the Keystone XL pipeline, I hope the Biden administration sticks to their “principles” and shuts that down too. It will be interesting to see.