There is no year 0 AD. It goes for 1 BC to 1 AD.

What deference would it make if they did?

Moving sheep from on pasture land to another doesn’t change the emissions from these sheep.

The question is what happened to the land these sheep use to be on.

Don’t worry he wasn’t lying to you, he was just presenting alternative facts .

This is the trolley problem.

The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments that should be morally equivalent. In all variations, the reader can choose to take an action that will directly result in the death of an innocent person who was otherwise ‘safe’, or do nothing and allow a larger group of people to die, and ask what is the morally correct choice.

There’s no right answer to the trolley problem. The interesting take away is that what most people agree is the morally correct answer depends how the problem is framed.

When the situation is framed as “you’re deciding between one person dying and many people dying” most people will agree the morally correct choice is the one where the fewest people die.

But when the situation is framed as “are you justified in murdering an innocent person to save many” most people agree the morally correct answer is no.

There’s even one variation where is is considered by most morally correct to murder one person to save many, if the person you’re murdering is responsible for putting the larger group in harms way in the first place.

Money isn’t the limiting factor though.

There’s plenty of money waiting to be spent on green electricity projects that’s bottlenecked by grid connections, permitting, panel and turbine manufacturing, rare element supply chains and host of other factors slowing down how quickly we can build new renewable capacity.

Also the typical LCOE cost comparison approach doesn’t factor in the cost of grid connections, which is lower for a nuclear power plant than it is for an equivalent capacity of renewables. Nuclear is still more expensive on average, but the difference isn’t as clear cut and there a cases where nuclear might be cheaper in the long run.

Everytime nuclear comes up on Reddit/Lemmy we always seem to argue whether nuclear or renewables is better choice like it’s a choice between the two. Both nuclear and renewables are slam dunk choices compared to fossil fuels on every metric if you factor in even an overly optimistic case analyisis of the financial impacts of climate change. (Nevermind giving considerations of the humanatarian impact.)

80+% of our planet’s energy still comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables have been smashing growth records year over year for a long time now and yet we haven’t even reached the point where we’re adding new renewables capacitiy faster than energy demand is increasing. We’re still setting new records annually for total fossil fuel consumed. Hell we haven’t even gotten to the point where we stopped building new Coal-fired power stations yet.

The people who argue that “we don’t need nuclear, renewabes are cheaper and faster” you’re missing the reality of sheer quantity of energy needed. We can’t build enough new renewables fast enough to save us regardless of how much money is invested. There aren’t enough sources of the raw materials needed to make that happen quickly enough, we can’t connect them to the grid quickly enough, we cant build new factories for solar panels and wind turbines fast enough. Yes, we will undoubetly continure to accelerate our new renewables projects at a record setting paces each year but it’s not enough, it’s not even close. Even our most optimistic , accelerated projections don’t put us anywhere close to displacing fossil fuel consumption in the next 10-20 years.

We need to stop arguing over which is better. We need to do it all.

Not sure where you’re getting 250kwh/m2/year from. If it was one contiguous solid panel maybe you could achieve that and then you’d be correct it would be about 560,000 km2. Or roughly the size of France.

But you need to leave space between the panels in a solar farm for them to be at the optimal angle without casting shadows on each other. Real world solar farms have much lower density than that.

The density can vary significantly, our hypothetical solar island could be anywhere from the 6th to the 50th largest country but regardless we’re still talking about something in the area of a trillion individual solar panels.

Assuming money isn’t the limiting factor (which it isn’t in most countries) we don’t have anywhere close to the ability to manufacture and deploy that many panels by 2030 or 2035.

Assuming we maintain exponential growth of both wind and solar (doubtful) we’re still a least two decades away from eliminating fossil fuel electricity generation never mind meeting the 2-3x generation capacity needed to transition transportation and other consumers of fossil fuels over to electricity.

Renewables growth has shattered estimates before, you never know, but the transition is not happening any where near as fast as people seem to think.

You might want to do some basic math on the current rates at which renewable energy and global energy demand is growing.

The world burned 140,000 TWh worth of fossil fuels last year, a new record because global energy demand is still growing faster than total new renewable generation.

Let’s say we built an island of floating PV panels in the ocean large enough to generate that much energy.

It would be the 8th largest country in the world.

No we’re not going to hit 70% by 2035 even assuming it maintains exponential growth, not even close.

No.

MW is the maximum capacity not the average.

A nuclear reactor runs at close to its maximum output pretty much 24/7/365.

A solar farm only operates during the day, and even then it only operates at maximum output in the middle of a clear sunny day.

The overall average output of a nuclear plant is typically around 90% of its capacity.

The overall average output of solar farm is 20-25%.

This massive farm will still only output a bit more electricity than what a single nuclear reactor outputs.

A nuclear power station typically has more than one reactor, so compared to a typical nuclear power station this isn’t even close to the average nuclear plant.

Though it does beat a few of the smallest nuclear plants that only have a single reactor.

Nuclear outputs a fuck-ton of electricity for its size.

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Sometimes ChatGPT/copilot’s code predictions are scary good. Sometimes they’re batshit crazy. If you have the experience to be able to tell the difference, it’s a great help.

I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.

The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.

Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.

Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.

Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.

Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.

The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.

Yes you’re correct. I will qualify my previous statement as hydrogen powered road vehicles don’t make sense for now.

The problem at the moment is that electricity generation is not carbon free and in most countries not even close.

Unfortunately the transition to a carbon free electric grid is being significantly retarded by policymakers that are, as you say, myopic. As a result it will be at least two more decades before hydrogen makes sense.

The carbon footprint of lithium battery manufacturing, is small compared to the carbon footprint of electricity generation. Until that changes significantly lithium batteries will continue to be a better choice than hydrogen fuel cell.

Hydrogen may make sense in a future where we’ve eliminated all fossil fuel electricity generation and there’s an abundance of carbon free electricity that can be used to create green hydrogen as a form of energy storage. Though by the time that point comes, we may have developed battery technology or some other energy storage technology that doesn’t carry the same carbon footprint that lithium ion does today.

Hydrogen doesn’t make sense and never did as a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in vehicles.

Most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, and has a lot of emissions during manufacturing. But even green hydrogen, which is made by using carbon free generated electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen doesn’t make sense.

If you’ve build new renewable power it’s more efficient to use it to charge batteries than to use it to generate hydrogen.

There might be a case for compressed hydrogen, In vehicles where batteries are too heavy like aircraft.

But for road vehicles, batteries are more effective at reducing emission.

If you’re building any new renewable power, you’ll reduce more emissions by using it to displace coal power, the to generate green hydrogen.

Some day when we’ve eliminated fossil fuel based electricity generation, Green hydrogen might start to make sense. But anybody trying to do it right now is not being as helpful as they could be.

Stated goals of the UN charter according Wikipedia:

to maintain international peace and security, uphold international law, achieve “higher standards of living” for their citizens, address “economic, social, health, and related problems”, and promote "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

Did they even read the charter before having their little temper tantrum?

Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.

Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.

You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.

Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.

You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.

And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.

Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.

It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…

…or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.

Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.

There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.

Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.

The pro-lifers that think there should just be an exceptions when mother’s life is at risk need to also hear that the Texas law already has an exemption for when a doctor uses their “reasonable medical judgment” that the life of the mother is at risk or the pregnancy poses “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

All pregnancies are a risk to the mother’s life, anytime a doctor performs an abortion in Texas they risk losing their license, and possibly even prison time. Which is why we have these case of mothers with unviable pregnancies that aren’t terminated until they’re almost dead.

If you care about life, why on earth would you support a law that takes informed medical decisions away from doctors and their patients to put it in the hands of lawyers and lawmakers?

We’re both correct.

LCOE is based on total operating costs of new electric power generation station over a 20+ year operation life. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in these sorts of analyses but Nat Gas is projected to become cheaper than Coal over the life of a new project, which some of that is expected to be due to carbon taxes.

LCOE has some flaws as a comparable number when comparing wind and solar to fossil fuels, but is good for understanding what will be cheapest to build of fuel based generation.

For current existing power stations, coal is cheapest of the fuels. The EIA numbers are here and here’s Statista research here on the historical cost of nat gas vs coal specifically which is frustratingly why coal phase outs have been so slow. Keeping existing coal plants operating is cheaper than building new almost anything.

And you are correct, price is specific to geography and availability of each. My blanket statement of “coal being the cheapest fuel” is over generalized and not universally correct.

It’s expensive and dirty fuel.

It’s definitely the dirtiest fuel by a good margin. But coal is actually the cheapest fuel. Which is the main reason it still gets used.

Uranium used to be cheaper than coal, but now that we all but stopped building nuclear power plants it’s gone up significantly.

Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal for electricity generation, if we can limit growth in energy demand to a rate lower than the growth in renewables, economics will eventually push all electricity generation off of coal.

I thought the Quran made no mention of FGM, and that the practice was discouraged (or outright forbidden) by Islamic fatwas / religious scholars.