this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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Trump Orders Faster Build-Out of Nuclear Power Plants | Among a flurry of executive actions, Mr. Trump directed the nation’s nuclear safety regulator to speed up approvals for new reactors. (www.nytimes.com)
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It's worth noting that he also fired many of the staff who know how to ensure that they're actually safe, as well as the staff who would approve financing.

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[–] Mihies -1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Nuclear doesn’t make sense for that purpose because it’d have to quickly be able to spin up and down. Most reactor designs aren’t really able to do it quickly in normal operations, and those that can can’t do so in a way that makes any economic sense. They’re financially outcompeted by their alternatives.

Yes, you are right about nuclear output flexibility. Their purpose is to provide stable output, not chime in when required - and that's the problem with renewables - there is no good solution to compensate when they are not producing. Feel free to list those alternative reliable solutions.

Storage is the solution, which we can build today in a viable way and is rapidly becoming cheaper and cheaper.

And I have yet to see real energy storage data. All I read is just "energy storage is the solution (which, of course, it is, someday)" yadda yadda. So, numbers, please.

[–] ChairmanMeow 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Our best current alternative option that's already there is sadly gas. It's fast, cheap and emissions are not the worst of the bunch. Still bad though.

As far as battery storage is concerned, battery prices have dropped 97% in the last three decades (and it's still dropping quite quickly). See https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline for a pretty good overview. And that's not taking into account other forms of energy storage like water-based storage or new batteries based on sodium.

The batteries we have now are already cheap enough to purchase for individual customers, and including solar panels means it's already possible to effectively take houses off the grid. In 10 years those prices will be 50-25% of their current price in pessimistic scenarios. Solar is dropping in price at similar rates.

[–] Mihies -2 points 14 hours ago

Yep, gas is a good climate warming enabler. Which we want to avoid since we are fighting climate warming - funny eh, that renewables instead of nuclear causes more gas/coal being burned.

As for batteries, perhaps, but today we don't have any of those at scale required. And while houses could get off grid today with li-ion batteries where lithium is not infinite (nor are rare earths required), it doesn't solve cities and industry or energy storage at scale. Plus those batteries tend to catch fire which is hard to extinguish. Water based storage is limited by geography. And so on.