Climate change

Mooney_Driver wrote:

But if you feel so strongly about it, how come you still fly?

If you refer to my personal flying it – or even all of GA – is negligible. Pleasure boats in Sweden produce orders of magnitude more CO2 than do GA. Also, I (or rather my club) am paying for carbon offsets.

This could possibly be seen as hypocritical but the climate issue is a structural problem in our society and as such it can’t be solved by individual decisions – it needs collective (political) decisions. I don’t like engaging in purely symbolic individual actions just to “look good”. I know people who have changed into a rural self-sufficient lifestyle and say that by this they take responsibility for the climate. In my opinion, they have achieved absolutely nothing. Instead, I engage politically to get large scale changes. If such changes will lead to a restriction in GA, so be it.

Forbes:
The total world energy usage (coal+oil+hydroelectric+nuclear+renewable) in 2015 was 13,000 Million Ton Oil Equivalent (13,000 MTOE) – see World Energy Consumption & Stats. This translates to 17.3 Terawatts continuous power during the year.

Now, if we cover an area of the Earth 335 kilometers by 335 kilometers with solar panels, even with moderate efficiencies achievable easily today, it will provide more than 17,4 TW power. This area is 43,000 square miles. The Great Saharan Desert in Africa is 3.6 million square miles and is prime for solar power (more than twelve hours per day). That means 1.2% of the Sahara desert is sufficient to cover all of the energy needs of the world in solar energy. There is no way coal, oil, wind, geothermal or nuclear can compete with this. The cost of the project will be about five trillion dollars, one time cost at today’s prices without any economy of scale savings. That is less than the bail out cost of banks by Obama in the last recession. Easier to imagine the cost is 1/4 of US national debt, and equal to 10% of world one year GDP. So this cost is rather small compared to other spending in the world.

Airborne_Again wrote:

If you refer to my personal flying it – or even all of GA – is negligible….

Great post!
I try to take the bicycle instead of the car, turn off the lights and reuse plastic drinking bottles (LHR EGLL has filling stations [a bit filthy]) etc.. but, I got paid the other day to burn 80 tons of jet a so 300 people can nurture their instagrams with „new“ impressions of some useless theme park or local food.
Adding to that I commute to work using an airbus 321 mostly.

This problem needs to be solved by smart people in a best practice way, not by lobbyists who know that a liter of oil has the monetary profitability potential while commercializing “indi self sustain living” for the herd and leeching that market as well. E.g. Germany opts out of nuclear, but low and behold the big car makers get away with everything, while some brainwashed person is spending money to (thermally insulate) = air tighten a tent in the woods (exaggeration!) using synthetic materials that are the toxic waste of tomorrow.
It’s not about ecology it’s about economy, about the money…everywhere, and that’s the problem.

Airborne_Again wrote:

If you refer to my personal flying it – or even all of GA – is negligible.

I fully agree, yet we are now discussing since 12 pages triggered by a guy who got shot down by the press for doing exactly that, flying a 150hp airplane a few times a year over 90 NM in a commute and being nailed to the media cross, danger of job loss, e.t.c. for his “crime against climate”. All that while the footprint of those flights was probably better than the alternative to travel.

That is what angers me in the whole debate. People point fingers rather than taking their own fingers out to personally and without much ado do something reasonable. People will flock after demagogues from BOTH sides of the spectrum and by doing this actually hamper efforts which can be made and should be made. Snoopy shows one example, but there are others which are much easier: Have a solar powered hot water tank on your house or put solar panels for electricity, see to it that in your community people stop chopping down trees because they are “in the way of the view” without replacing them, move closer to your workspace so you don’t have to commute silly distances and loose life time doing that, e.t.c

On a larger level, there are things which can be done to counter CO2 concentration and generally make a better planet, but they are hardly talked about at all, mainly because they are either not bringing any votes to local politicians or they are outside their influence or they are politically unacceptable to the majority of the baying hounds. The result is a total mess, which contradicts the general goals while pushing out arbitrary “climate goals” which nobody knows what they will do.

Examples? We have ample possibility to produce electricity without buring fossil fuels, yet e.g. in Germany the panik after Fukushima led to the opposite, climate neutral nuclear plants in perfect conditon were shut down prematurely and coal and oil burining plants re-opened. At the same time they frontally attack their own car industry and ban diesels from cities and promote electric cars which, as studies show, have a worse co2 footprint than the banned diesels. Every time they want to put up solar plants or wind plants, there is opposition from, you guess it, the same people who demonstrate for saving the planet. We could also do more dams and water powered electricity, but it will mean some lakes which will eat up landscape in the alps and elsewhere.

I live in a country which is blessed to produce ALL its electric energy from CO2 neutral sources, mostly water and 3 remaining nuclear plants. The financial situation of our country also means that new tech like the low consumption hybrid cars and now the electric cars are very popular and replace others fast. Yet people still start blaming each other for being “sinners” against climate, even for having children, even though the average here is even less than one child per family, which in statistical numbers would mean that sooner or later there will be a decrease in population as when 2 people produce one on average, it’s pure math. STILL it’s not enough, now people are told not to have children at all. So who are we doing all this for then?

Or those who say we should stop all medical aid to third world countries to decimate the population there? How cynic can you get?

I am not one of those people who deny climate change nor am I one to claim that it is all natural, I am sceptic of doomsday sayers as most of the time in the past they knowingly or unknowingly exagarated their predictions to get attention and there is no difference here. I am opposing the dystropic future views these people try to impose on us and throw the world into depression rather than showing a way to a better future by doing what can and should be done rather than trying to turn people to sheeple.

One factor which I hear absolutely nothing about these days is that it would be vital to replace forests which have been cut down for wood and for space, often leaving behind empty spaces. Forests and green plants are the lungs of this planet. There is nothing wrong with logging per se, but replacement trees must be planted as it has been done in Europe and elsewhere for decades. Rainforests must be conserved or at least be worked properly, that is they can be logged but if so they need to be reforestated continously. And so on. There are lots of possibilities which will actually improve the econonomy and will give people something rather than exercising vain power and trying to take things away. That will never work without violence.

So I am told that I am sinning against the environment with my small plane which uses less fuel per year than the heating of a small house, with my car in which I travel about 5000 km per year, while I live 3 minutes from my workspace and have in recent years done many things to improve my house and what not. Well, I am sinning even more by breathing and by supporting two more breathing beeings in this world. Well, as those who protest and accuse are not ready to take the ultimate consequence and remove themselfs from this planet but instead do their best to make life miserable for those of us who try to make a normal healthy and concious living, forgive me for not holding my breath.

Or those who say we should stop all medical aid to third world countries to decimate the population there? How cynic can you get?

Also, how wrong can you get?

Part of the reason people have large families in the developing world is that, without social security or pensions to fall back on, your children are your retirement fund. The expectation is that they’ll look after you. If there’s high childhood and adult mortality then you need to have lots, to make sure.

That is obviously a fairly broad-brush way of viewing things, but the evidence is that as the population becomes more educated (women in particular) and public health improves, birth rates fall.

kwlf wrote:

Also, how wrong can you get?

I know…. it’s wrong in any way possible.

That was a really excellent post Silvaire. Echoes my sentiments to a tee. I had a discussion similar to yours the other day. On my death I want a direct cremation, no fuss, no nonsense, exit by least resistance. My listener tried on several occasions to tell me that was selfish, not legal in the UK and that to think of others. I will be dead was my response to him. If I do not care now, I am definitely not going to care when I am a recently deceased.

Snoopy wrote:

It’s not about ecology it’s about economy, about the money…everywhere, and that’s the problem.

One other – self image promotion. That Dame Emma Thomson flew from LA, to join the London Extinction Rebellion, to shout about air pollution. Started to take over the group, we this, we that blah blah. Probably flew Business….

None of them get any of the irony. It is a shame really.

How would you distribute 17000 gigawatts from Africa around the world?

Can you imagine the terrorism interest? The whole installation would need to be guarded like Fort Knox – but this is along a “border” several thousand km long. And the remote control port for it would need a password longer than 5 characters

Bear in mind a gigawatt is what really big power station generator produces.

That is less than the bail out cost of banks by Obama in the last recession

That didn’t “cost” anything; that money was generated electronically and injected into the system by the central bank, so it “just” produced some inflation And the US IRS got most of it back, by keeping those banks in business.

How would you distribute 17000 gigawatts from Africa around the world?

In the form of smelted aluminium?

The answer of course is that you wouldn’t. You’d install them wherever they are needed. The ‘area smaller than a small country’ thing is just to illustrate that it’s feasible to meet a large part of our power needs from that source.

In my book another advantage of solar power is that you don’t need a grid. As the world gets more interconnected, the risk of a country being brought to its knees by a small peturbation in the supply of coal, oil, or the internet becomes ever greater. Caracas would be a much more agreeable place to live if more people had solar power.