The World's Transition to Renewable Energies

[Fake Messiah]

Are you fucking serious? How are farmers going to raise their crops/livestock? What are all the trains, trucks, freighters, etc. supposed to use for fuel? Electric air liners?

Are you fucking drunk?

Read again: synthetic methanol. It can be used in gasoline cars. Some countries already have cars that can use both gasoline and ethanol. All other vehicles can use it too: tractors, airplanes, ships, trains.

Sahara? Water?

Sea water.

[The Grand Nudger]

To add, since we're talking about alternatives to digging up coal and pumping oil - on site biofuel production for ag enterprise has been shown to be profitable at every scale. From a single 25h sub compact servicing a local farmers market once a month to the kind of behemoths required in number to run a conventional plasticulture op with commercial customers on a schedule as tight as 19 days.

Not going to be a thing until we stop dumping massive subsidies on the ff industry...and neither will any other alternative be, truly.

[A. Secular Human]

Are you fucking serious? How are farmers going to raise their crops/livestock? What are all the trains, trucks, freighters, etc. supposed to use for fuel? Electric air liners?

Are you fucking drunk?

Read again: synthetic methanol. It can be used in gasoline cars. Some countries already have cars that can use both gasoline and ethanol. All other vehicles can use it too: tractors, airplanes, ships, trains.

Sahara?  Water?

Sea water.

Would need to be purified first, which requires yet more energy.

It can be (and is being) done today, but the final product is expensive.

[Leonardo17]

.and the point isn't to get off oil for getting off oils own sake..but so that things might be better.

Someone once said
"The Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil."

Battery technology has been improving, but it's unlikely to ever overcome the energy density of petrol, so the weight issue will plague EVs for a long long time... perhaps being solved when motor efficiency improves too.

People have the issue of range anxiety, mostly due to the perceived lack of public charging points and the long time it takes to charge batteries, when compared with the ubiquitous petrol stations and the 2 minutes it takes to fill up a tank. Fix these two issues and EV adoption will skyrocket.

There are those who enjoy the feeling of driving an ICE car, but for most of us who just want to get from point A to B they're just clucky in comparison with EVs. gearbox? clutch? lubricant? radiator?  

There was a time when I enjoyed red meat a lot and I used to light my cigarette over dinner. Back then that was the normal thing to do. Today we know that a vegetable-rich diet is more appropriate if you intend to keep living until your 90’s. We also know for sure that cigarettes are worse than alcohol and/or things like marijuana in many ways.
 
It’s not that I was perfectly comfortable with these changes. It’s just that I don’t have another body.

[Leonardo17]

Hey, I have a solution in which people can still keep their cars and planes and get off oil: synthetic ethanol. Now, I am not talking about that grown methanol but let's say people make solar thermal powerplants in Sahara where they use electricity to suck carbon from the air and take hydrogen from the water. Then they mix hydrogen and carbon and thus make ethanol that can run existing gasoline cars (with a little tweak), trucks and airplanes.

Otherwise, people should immediately stop flying, cut down on eating meat (like once a week), buy less, and stop using ocean freighters until they find a substitute for oil.

Sahara?  Water?

Yes that’s how they do it in Morocco to produce electricity. If you want green hydrogen it’s only a matter of logistics to bring some pure water to separate into liquid hydrogen and Oxygen.

A. Secular Human

Modern Atheism
Air is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. I don't see us being able to extract a lot of carbon from it

There are already constructions made exclusively to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

https://www.science.org/content/article/switzerland-giant-new-machine-sucking-carbon-directly-air


These technologies are very small scale. Carbon capture works in other places like cement factories and/or coal plants that have not been closed yet. We need hundreds of thousands of such carbon capture plants to obtain any significant change.

 
One thing we can do is capture carbon from sea water. Or use some chemicals that will cause the carbon in the ocean to sink to the bottom of the sea thus allowing oceans to capture more carbon without more sea acidification.
 
One think I have heard is that there not just one solution to climate change. It’s a combination of many different solution. I we implement them (although it’s not the most comfortable thing to do), we survive.

[Fake Messiah]

Would need to be purified first, which requires yet more energy.

It can be (and is being) done today, but the final product is expensive.

Well, the synthetic diesel would probably need subsidies to be viable, but then again, oil industry already gets huge subsidies:

Fossil-fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion last year as governments supported consumers and businesses during the global spike in energy prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the economic recovery from the pandemic.

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/20...7-trillion

[The Grand Nudger]

That's so much of the trouble. HVO doesn't require subsidy for viability - it simply can't compete with a subsidy queen like mineral diesel.

[A. Secular Human]

Sahara?  Water?

Yes that’s how they do it in Morocco to produce electricity. If you want green hydrogen it’s only a matter of logistics to bring some pure water to separate into liquid hydrogen and Oxygen.

A. Secular Human

Modern Atheism
Air is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. I don't see us being able to extract a lot of carbon from it

There are already constructions made exclusively to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

https://www.science.org/content/article/switzerland-giant-new-machine-sucking-carbon-directly-air


These technologies are very small scale. Carbon capture works in other places like cement factories and/or coal plants that have not been closed yet. We need hundreds of thousands of such carbon capture plants to obtain any significant change.

 
One thing we can do is capture carbon from sea water. Or use some chemicals that will cause the carbon in the ocean to sink to the bottom of the sea thus allowing oceans to capture more carbon without more sea acidification.
 
One think I have heard is that there not just one solution to climate change. It’s a combination of many different solution. I we implement them (although it’s not the most comfortable thing to do), we survive.

I'm guessing you didn't bother to read the linked story.

It's being done on an industrial scale.

[Leonardo17]

That's so much of the trouble.  HVO doesn't require subsidy for viability - it simply can't compete with a subsidy queen like mineral diesel.

…and liquid Hydrogen is not the best way to transport energy from point A to point B either. There are futuristic projects that may start happening in the next decade rather than during our decade. There will be huge solar plants in deserts + huge windfarms in places like the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea (as soon as the conflict in Ukraine is over of course) that will be transferred to the electricity grid of countries currently relying on natural gas and coal energy:





 
And I thing Arabs could be the leaders of these projects. They are currently spending their money on artificial islands and some other Artur C. Clarke cities like Neom in the desert. With ideas like this, they could start supplying the whole world with clean energy.
 
A secular Human:
 
No, but I know a lot about the issue. The article says:
 
“While the amount of CO2 is a small fraction of what firms and climate advocates hope to trap at large fossil fuel plants, Climeworks says its venture is a first step in their goal to capture 1 percent of the world's global CO2 emissions with similar technology. To do so, there would need to be about 250,000 similar plants, the company says.”

[pocaracas]

You know how dark solar panels are?
You know that they heat up?... and trap heat from the sun that would otherwise be reflected back, like in "huge solar plants in deserts"?
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070

The Photovoltaic Heat Island Effect: Larger solar power plants increase local temperatures :
...
Average annual temperature was 22.7 + 0.5 °C in the PV installation, while the nearby desert ecosystem was only 20.3 + 0.5 °C, indicating a PVHI effect.
[...]
The results presented here demonstrate that the PVHI effect is real and can significantly increase temperatures over PV power plant installations relative to nearby wildlands. More detailed measurements of the underlying causes of the PVHI effect, potential mitigation strategies, and the relative influence of PVHI in the context of the intrinsic carbon offsets from the use of this renewable energy are needed.

However, this effect is much lower when you compare a PV installation with a parking lot, so it makes sense to cover parking lots in PV panels, thur providing shade to cars and further lowering the need to use AC to cool down a car that spent hours in the scorching sun.