by Tanada » Tue 04 Feb 2020, 12:21:55
vtsnowedin wrote:Tanada wrote:
Week beginning on January 26, 2020: 414.09 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 411.06 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 389.37 ppm
Tanada do you have a handle on what percent of vehicles need to be switched to BEVs (exclusively charged by solar and wind power) for those CO2 numbers to start going down?
To make a decline in annual numbers I presume? Let me put it this way,
1) ICE vehicles using liquid fuels for 99.9% of the cases today as BEV have made a minuscule impact at this point. Those ICE vehicles produce about 45% of world CO2 emissions with power production producing another 40% and direct heating/industrial processes producing about 15% of the total. Numbers are off the top of my head but are all within the ballpark.
2) CO2 sinks in the world as a whole presently absorb and retain about 38% of human caused emissions counting everything from forest fires to all those deliberate fossil fuel consuming activities.
3) This leaves a minimum gap of 62% reduction necessary to pause CO2 at the current level and at least 63% to start resulting in a decline.
4) 63%-45%=18% means if every ICE vehicle is replaced we are still increasing CO2 though at a substantially slower rate. Convert to 100% Renewables and Nuclear with no fossil fuel power production allowed and you can do another 18%-40%= -22% for a significant rate of CO2 possible reduction.
5) Unfortunately in the last 15 years that I have been tracking these numbers the trend has been very firmly in the opposite direction. Politicians in the west continue to encourage the shuttering of fully functional nuclear power stations replacing them with Natural Gas or even worse Coal combustion. They also discourage the construction of a fleet of next generation nuclear power to offset the growth in population and demand as formerly backward nations create an electrical supply for their vast populations. Even worse, if that is possible, the world fleet of ICE powered vehicles has been increasing in leaps and bounds. It is fine to say the rate of increase in China has slowed, but that doesn't mean a lot when the nation went from about 1.2 million ICE vehicles in 2005 to almost 60 Million in 2019. India has also greatly increased their number of ICE vehicles though not quite as spectacularly as China. Meanwhile in the USA/Canada the growth rate of ICE vehicles continues to pace the population increase despite all claims that we had peaked and were in decline during the Obama Administration.
For these reasons I continue to urge a strategy of adaptation. Humans are combustion loving apes. If we find something flammable sooner or later we put it to the torch, and that goes double for cheap things like fossil fuels that make life more comfortable in the short term.
I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
