You're viewing a single thread.
I wonder what could help reduce our carbon emissions.
Should we invest heavily in nuclear? No, it’s private cars that are the problem. Let’s restrict those, and while we’re at it we should close down our nuclear power plants and replace them with gas ones instead.
/s in case it wasn’t obvious. Unless you’re German, in which case this is exactly what happened.
EDIT: your, you’re
Permanently Deleted
Except in germany noone would ever dare blame/restrict private cars in any way. See eg the ridiculous "discussion" on a potential highway speed limit. For non-germans: Yes, speed on highways is generally unrestricted and for some reason that seems to be more important to us than safety or protecting the climate.
Ya.. but you can't blame the poor volk. Since the war ended we've been praised for our Autobahns. Our Autobahns are the best and fastest and most reliablest, we are always on time and don't get me started on precision. Just how precise are we Germans? Who cares about enviroment, we are the best in something! Fuck nature. Like the boys from Kraftwerk sang:
♬ Autobahn Autobahn ♬ Wir fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n, auf der Autobahn Wir fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n, auf der Autobahn ♬..it's a banger tho..
Unless you’re German, in which case this is exactly what happened.
It's not what happened.
Nuclear power got replaced by renewable energy. Gas was mainly needed for heating (~50 % of households use gas, ~25 % use oil) and the industry (steel, glas....), much less for power. Germany even reduced their gas consumption heavily. The gas used for power is roughly the same amount as before shutting down npp.
Except fossil fuel production went UP when "renewable replaced nuclear".
While renewable was built out quite a bit and nuclear was decreased at roughly the same time, total demand has risen (as it tends to do) and that delta was filled by more fossil fuel production.
IMO (and many other peoples) the climate-positive approach would have been to keep nuclear, while building out renewables and phasing out fossil. And then try to build more renewables to get rid of nuclear, if that's still desired.
this is the German power production for the last 30 years. Shutting down nuclear started in early 2000s
brown = brown coal, pink = black coal, grey = nuclear, yellow = gas, blue = oil, green = renewables
What I can read in this graphic is black coal and nuclear got phased out. Brown coal sunk a little bit and renewables multiplied their production.
Yes, I support your opinion, it would've been better having 25-30% nuclear power instead of coal. I guess this wasn't possible as nuclear always had a bad stance in Germany and coal was a big employer. Maybe a bit like Norway and its oil.
But at the point Germany is now or was a year ago it's way easier, cheaper and faster to invest in renewables instead of building new npp.
How exactly has Germany restricted private cars? And if they are so restricted, why are they still 20% of our emissions? https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/verkehr/emissionen-des-verkehrs (correction: private cars 12, transport lorries 8)
Also here is the current mix of energy sources https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/Strommix-Deutschland-Wie-ist-der-Anteil-erneuerbarer-Energien,strommix102.html
Germany has chosen renewable over nuclear. I am glad we did. I am not happy they restored some coal, but if you compare to earlier levels also visible in the article, you will see an overall reduction. Leaving out that we have been phasing out nuclear during the last 15 or so years to build more renewable and then being like 'look, no nuclear, such a lack of responsibility!' smh
Your comment seems intended to agitate international readers with false portrayal of facts and glossing over stuff via sarcasm. Shame on that kind of behavior just to push your views.
Nuclear (+ renewables) powering walkable cities ftw.
Not even just for the climate, we'd probably cut asthma and a dozen cancer rates with the clean air.
Build nuclear AND restrict cars
Looks like fuckcars is leaking again. You know that place where every single human being in the world lives in a major city?
It's a 2 hour round trip in a car for me to get groceries dude, but I'm out here growing trees. What do you do?
Do you not understand what the word "restrict" means?
We're subsidizing your Internet, power, and most other infrastructure and public services that cost too much at rural densities.
I wish we'd stop doing that at this point.
-
I use starlink - I paid for the hardware on the ground, the rest of it is in space. There is no other internet out here.
-
We have no public services, I have to drive to them or provide them myself. No water, no sewage.
-
The power is generated 36km from my house and the cost of gold plating the grid to get that power is disproportionately reflected in MY power bill so that those in the city 200km away can have electricity.
Can I ask what demographic you fit into that you seem to sincerely believe the world would keep functioning if everyone lived in cities, and that with your obviously limited exposure to how the world works, you believe you have it all figured out?
-
While also having one of the highest energy prices in Europe.
But seriously we should try to cut the percentage of our electricity that is being produced by coal. This should be our first priority, even if it means to temporarily replace it with gas. Then gas emissions are once again on the rise due to the general trend of producing ever bigger cars.
Meat consumption and deforestation, combined with higher risk of wild fires, etc.
I hope in the future we manage to create sustainable nuclear fusion reactor and we ditch all non renewable energy sources.
A high carbon tax would fit perfectly. Introduce it at the start of the system such that it directly affects those that pollute the most, and vice versa.
IIRC there’s already a carbon tax in place on most of the EU via the EU ETS.
Yeah I think you are right. But it should be equal to the environmental cost per co2 amount. So if consuming x amount of co2 costs y amount of environmental damage, then the tax should be y amount per x co2 produced.
I am guessing the current tax is way below anything like this.
I wonder what could help reduce our carbon emissions.
At the moment I'm getting the feeling that only one, drastic, solution has a small chance in succeeding... a lot less humans on the earth (< 50%). The rest of nature is pretty busy trying to establish a new equilibrium until humans realize they are also a part of nature and nature isn't the one in problems, but humans (as well as a lot of other species) are.
For some strange reason (religion maybe?) humans think they're not in the pool of biodiversity species.
Only have to get rid of 1% or so to fix it. And it's not the groups you're dogwhistling genocide of because they contribute an order of magnitude less than you do.
Oh, the top 1% will help a lot, but either way either 'the west' will need to lower their standard of living, or humanity needs to be culed like crazy.
With the standard of living of US and Europe, the world can support about 1B humans. We all can do the math.
