Jon Steward:

Coilin

I agree with you

Andy doesn't mention that all the new tech uses masses of fossil fuels to manufacture and deploy and will do again in the future when it comes to disposal. And makes no case for the poor souls mining the Cobalt and Lithium

I'm no expert but my gut feeling tells me this whole CO2 reducing tech is bonkers and one day will be seen as exactly that. Anyway I read that by far the largest green house effect comes from water vapour.

But the "masses" of fossil fuels required to create wind turbines or solar panels are vastly less that the fossil fuels that would be burned to generate the equivalent amount of energy.

But the people who hate renewables will keep coming up with bogus statistics in order to justify their hatred.

Coilín:

Andy's remarks misrepresent the contents of the paper.


Energy efficiency is in fact discussed in section 4.1. 


The discussion of Malthusianism versus cornucopianism is also worth reading. Andy's summary is nonsensical. 


The authors make no apologies for a lack of creativity. We are researchers, not novelists. We have focused on those technologies that have received huge sums in the name of climate change expenditure, rather than emerging technologies such as hydrogen. 


We recommend that people read the paper for yourselves, rather than relying on Andy's inaccurate remarks. The whole paper is meticulously referenced, citing the research in engineering, environment, energy and climate policy. 

Ref efficiency, maybe I should have said "not as emphasised anything like as much as I would have done". Fair enough.


Re Malthus, obviously I disagree with you on this, and personally I consider it is incredibly important to question the assumption that Mathusian catastrophes will always be avoided by "someone else's" action.


(I do admit on re-reading it that my paragraph on this was unnecessarily sarcastic in tone, and I certainly apologise for that.)


But absolutely people should read this paper for themselves, amongst many others.


And question solutions by all means, no issue in the field of environmental issues has a simple solution. But I personally feel that questioning existing solutions implies a need to propose an viable alternative, which is where the creativity comes in, otherwise it's back the status quo which is not a good place to be. However, of course you can disagree by all means.


I don't intend to take any further part in this discussion, I think I've made the points I wanted to make and have no interest in having a row for the sake of having a row. It's just very frustrating that it feels like every time these forums start discussing potential solutions to reduce CO2 emissions they get shot down by statements that "that won't work" without ever proposing an alternative (not really true, there have been some interesting ideas come up, it just often feels that way). I think what you saw in my post was that frustration coming out...and please, better an imperfect solution than no solution...


Andy