China has only added dams by relocating entire towns, imagine the cost and legal wrangling to move entire towns in the US?

Would anyone notice or care of Detroit went missing?

Maybe no new dams, but there are other ways. Gravity Power

That's a method of storing energy, not generating it.

Inb4 the "google has a liberal agenda" herp derp

That's a really terrible summary of the article with obvious conservative bullshit. They never said that renewable energy won't work, only that TODAY's renewable energy isn't enough to reduce carbon emissions to a certain level by a certain year. New technologies are developed all the time. Progress has never been faster than it is now. Here's the actual article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change

It's a religion and we know how that goes.

lol

Someone doesn't understand the amount of energy we produce and consume.

BUT TEH SALMONS

Someone doesn't understand that the earth is irradiated with 10,000 times that amount of solar energy every year.

You can't grade me, you're not my carbine school teacher.

Convince the members of DU to go door to door and confiscate firearms.

It's a start.

and if you read to the end of the article the author makes good points that nuclear energy is the only renewable energy that's actually viable - if the costs weren't being artificially inflated

yep pretty much

True, but it would aid renewables. And it's hydro and power.

I didn't read the article yet but I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that the gist of this article is that renewable simple can't meet all demand in any practical sense, not that certain renewable energy sources don't work in certain circumstances where conditions are right.

The snake oil part, and I agree with DnPRK, is that we can just go all renewable and have a bunch of cheap clean energy and everyone is happy.  There's articles on Facebook about solar panel bike paths for fucks sake with a chorus of commenters going "OMG, we get all our energy this way!  This is the real deal!  Evil oil companies don't want you to know about this!"

People are literally chugging the Koolaid at the expense of energy being directed at finding realistic sources of energy.  When was the last time we built a nuclear plant?

Oh well in that case, I guess all we gotta do is cover 43,886,080 acres of desert with CSP at ~28% efficiency and we've got it licked!  

Nuclear.



then we can stop dicking around with stupid crap like windmills and other useless junk

you need to read the article to get the gist of it.

Makes perfect sense to me. The problem is with the NIMBYs and the lack of infrastructure for things like Nat Gas as a fuel for vehicles. If the govt was really serious about cutting emissions they would get on board with nat gas.

Not renewable, but how about a salt water powered car?  It's been approved in Europe.ttp://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/09/27/salt-water-powered-car-gets-approval-in-europe-yes-its-real/

Not a fish biologist here, but some study a few years back and maybe debunked by now. Showed that logging down to streams and rivers raised the temp of the water and did much more harm than the dams.

Also vast over fishing in the 70's, there have been some huge salmon runs in recent years in WA and even in CA on the Sacramento and Russian rivers

This.

I've been telling people for a very long time that even cutting Green House Gas Emissions to Zero won't stop climate change.
There is just too much of it already in the atmosphere.
This situation is also naturally accelerating as Permafrost melts and releases greenhouse gases.

Manmade CO2 emissions amount to something under 4% of total CO2 emissions from what I've read.   Just how much do we have to cut back to make a definitive difference?

Maybe instead of reducing CO2 emissions we need to find a beneficial way to consume CO2.

Here's a thought ever think the earth is here to help us get are start and we are meant to LEAVE IT some day?

It does work, but it alone cannot sustain us. We've built all the dams we can, you can only dam so many rivers so many times.

Top.  Men.

There's so much BS and so many misconceptions in this thread it's almost not worth posting.  Still, maybe I can learn something.

In what way is nuclear power a "renewable" source of energy.  I'd say it has low/zero CO2 emissions but is it truly renewable?

In what way would switching to natural gas for our energy needs help reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions?

Is hydroelectric renewable?  Doesn't the reservoir fill with silt after a while and the dam becomes useless?

Of these questions, I am most interested in the answer to the nuclear energy question.

At our current level of tech and national energy requirement and future growth out look, never is probably spot on. There are already been articles about the largest US solar plant failing to meet output goals....and they then blamed clouds, dust, and jet contrails as the reason for the shortfall.

Greenies do not consider Hydro-Electric to be a renewable energy. Most of the Greenies want to get rid of dams and hydro-electric.

We are in a massive population bubble that has been enabled by cheap oil and the petrochemical revolution.



 

Shitty idea,

It is entirely feasible to rely 100% on renewable energy as an individual, but not as a consumer, and that's where I plan on starting.

I'm 25, purchased and recently sold my first home for a profit, and am now renting while I find a better long term home, of which being net zero or off grid is a primary concern of mine.

Whether that involves going balls to the wall crazy and building a passive solar home, or just remodeling an existing stick built home for efficiency and outfitting with photo voltaic panels it is very conceivable on my $60k annual income. I am also very excited about the progress with electric cars, they aren't quite there yet for me but I'm hoping by the age of 30 to have an electric vehicle and net zero home.

This is possible because I live in an area that makes it possible. Good luck trying retrofit your overpriced city flat, or get out from underneath your $650k 3/2 house payments, or find room on your .1 acre lot, maybe the first step in going green would be to destroy urban areas, but then we'd have to put up with a lot more dummies out in the woods... I digress...

I plan on doing this because I think its personally and financially responsible to utilize my own collection and storage of energy, instead of relying on some bullshit power grid whose sole purpose is (like all other companies, and this shouldn't be a surprise, it's just why they exist) to turn a profit and because I genuinely care about the earth and environment. I have no idea (and neither does anyone else on this planet) if global warming or climate change or whatever the fuck they are calling it now is having a tangible impact on anything, and either way its beyond my control to deal with. But I do know that capturing energy through fossil fuels (while necessary) definitely does result in noise and good old regular pollution in the areas in which it is harvested, and I don't really dig that.

With that in mind, my super greenie weenie plan doesn't have any effect on most of the energy usage in the world especially on the commercial side of energy consumption and I don't really care. I'm sick of everyone always needing a master plan to fix every aspect of the universe. If people that were able to focused on becoming energy independent they and the rest of us would probably be better off. I'd like to see everyone that has the financial and geographical ability to make the transition do it, but only because in my opinion it is of sound reasoning to do so, and not because our government is mandating it.

Slightly easier to handle the fuel and waste safely



 

Those and good ol Jimmy Carter's ban on nuclear reprocessing in 77.

Fuckface.

Wat?

       
   
Geniuses, no doubt.

When you have enough fuel to power the earth for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, does it really matter?



 

If that's the device oil companies don't want you to know about, it runs on aluminum, which is oxidized to separate H2 from O. The H2 is then burned in the engine. After a while the aluminum needs to be replaced.



As for the project The Navy is working on. Synthetic hydrocarbons made from sea water could work, if you have a dozen or so spare nuclear reactors handy.

If your approach were to be examined in depth I bet it's actually worse for the environment than some or all mass produced energy feeding the grid.

 

T
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SUMMARIZED


You can't win.
You can't break even.
You can't cheat.
You can't get out of the game.

The End.

You fucking got gravy mixed in with the jellied cranberries and it ain't a pretty presentation on the plate.

So, tell me about the advancements in the internal combustion engine in the last 100 years.  

Hell, tell me of the advancements in the replacement of the ICE in automobiles over the past 100 years.

I'll give you a hint on the fucked upness:  We are still sucking up dinosaurs to fuel aircraft, trains, cars and xfer trucks.
AIN'T A DA-DA-DAMN BETTER FUEL than dinosaur juice has been found or invented to power those vehicles at this time or in the near future.

Thus endeth the lesson.

They will be unemployed and facing IRS action in 30 days.

It sure will, but not like you think.

More research and time is needed.  I don't see the downside.  Pull the politics out of the deal and make it a pure scientific inquiry.  

It's clear that the field badly needs a modern day Nikola Tesla.