As an electrical engineer I have long seen power grid resiliency as an issue getting a lot of attention. All technology and science is a work in progress. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. However, as MystrD says: that clean energy needs to come from somewhere; and I'll add it needs to be stored in something when the sun doesn't shine or wind doesn't blow. These questions and many others will employ bright minds for decades to come.
Here in CA we see transmission line failures causing catastrophic fires with loss of life and entire communities burnt down.
Rooftop solar is one way to lighten the load on the system but the power companies are becoming frightened of it and are trying to tax and regulate it to death. (The state utility commission is populated by former power company execs.) What they want are square mile solar fields in the desert. That way they keep central control over electricity generation and the ability to charge what they want.
Their idea of "upgrading the grid" is rolling blackouts on high fire danger days.
We don't have a choice. It is adapt or die. Some climate change is going to happen and this is the beginning.
Looking at it from a purely scientific POV, climate change is self limiting. As soon as enough people die off, carbon emissions will drop. There is a natural balance of CO2 and nature will eventually return to equilibrium. It may take decades or centuries.
Some cities will be uninhabitable. Structures will crumble. Foliage will gradually reclaim areas that were logged off/built up/burnt/flooded/eroded away. Kind of like Chernobyl.
There will be more rain overall and it will be redistributed. Even so, while some places will become much wetter, others will become drier. Probably where I live. :(
Climate zones will have moved north. All those cool weather trees in Canada will slowly be replaced with warm weather trees. Violent storms and fires are bad news to us but nature will abide. New growth sprouts up that will be better adapted to the climate. Extinction events are always followed by a burst of speciation, just takes a while. I suspect that "weed" species will do very well while "niche" species will have a hard time of it.
A lot of people don't realize this but we are technically in an ice age. For most of its history the planet was much hotter and rainier - except when everything was buried in glaciers and sea ice. Or the land was entirely arid desert. During the Cretaceous period there were no glaciers anywhere and no ice at either the north or south poles.
Famine might start a nuclear war. Might not be such a bad thing. The radiation will soon subside (Chernobyl again) nature will return and nuclear winter will cool things off a bit.
Another equally beautiful but different world will emerge with a lot fewer people who hopefully will have learned that it is not nice to fool with Mother Nature.
OTOH, we may just technology up, figure out how to extract massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, distribute heat reflective aerosols in the upper atmosphere, and generate terawatt levels of energy without carbon production. I give it a 50-50 shot. Stranger things have happened. We are lucky that the developed world already seems to be on its way to depopulation. China will be at half its current size in the 2050-2070 window.
Russia likes climate change. Siberia may become habitable and the Arctic navigable year round. I don't think Russia sees a downside. OTOH China has a LOT to lose but lacks the will to do much of anything. They need to burn that coal to grow enough to dominate the US.
Or we could all pitch in and lower our energy consumption and demand that government reduce the world's carbon footprint under the Kyoto treaty and then some. (At least the west is making tiny awkward reluctant stumbling steps in the right direction.) Yeah. Like that will ever happen. Humans are great in a crisis but suck at long term planning. Global warming won't feel like a crisis to most until mass depopulation events begin.
No so simple. A couple of years ago I attended a seminar on roof-top solar, including feeding the surplus to the grid. If not done properly it can cause your local transformer to explode turning the power pole into a roman candle. He had some impressive pictures of such unintended fireworks. It's doable, but may require reworking your connection to the utility grid.
I have recently been toying with the idea of a new blog highlighting the many little things we can all do to help the environment. I have a number of ideas, but I fear not enough to sustain an ongoing blog, and I have also struggled to settle on a format that is encouraging without sounding too preachy. For the moment, I have shelved that plan.
As a naturist, my philosophy is more than just living clothes free as much as I can, but also looking at my impact on the environment and trying to live in a way that reduces that impact.
There are many small things we can all do and perhaps should do, to reduce the harm we are doing to the planet. A lot of these steps are hampered by the large companies behind the products we consume, the marketing organisations that advertise these products and the large chain retailers that sell them to us.
There are many things that as a consumer I buy, where I should pay more attention to the environment when selecting my purchase, but often there are no viable alternatives presented to us.
Use a single blade razor rather than throw-away plastic cartridges. Use a shampoo bar rather than buying liquid shampoo in a plastic bottle. Choosing drinks that are sold in glass or aluminium rather than plastic. There are many many other ways we can decide as a consumer not to contribute to the waste we feed the planet every day.
One of the many barriers to making better decisions about the waste we generate in society is the lack of choice that we are given by the large companies selling us our everyday products. Take a walk down your supermarket aisle, where are the non-plastic packaging options? the reusable options? the environmentally-friendly options? Recycled plastic is still plastic, and finds its way into the soil, the waterways and the food chain.
On July 1st 2019, New Zealand banned plastic shopping bags and we are all now happy to take our cotton shopping bags or buy paper ones at the checkout. Our behaviours have changed and we relax patting ourselves on the back that we have done our bit for the environment.
The elephant in the room is that we haven’t even scratched the surface of what we could do, and big retail is not going to make that process easy without additional legislation. Governments are shy about interfering with commercial decisions, and unless there is a vote in it, they are unlikely to stir up too much fuss to change things.
Consumers can do so much, but we also need these large companies to stop creating waste in their packaging in the first place. Perhaps if we all stopped buying drinks in plastic bottles, manufacturers would look for alternative solutions, but as long as they still make money from selling us convenient plastic, nothing will change.
Advertisers are quick to sell us a solution, often to a problem we didn’t know we had, to save time and effort. Sometimes, in order to impact the planet less, we need to put in a little more effort, and that is often the cost of change rather than a financial one. Making your own yoghurt rather than buying a ready-made variety in a plastic tub takes effort. We need to accept that and get on with it.
Sometimes it is less about the big things we do, but the little things that count. Every journey to mass change starts with one person taking one step. If enough people take small steps to change the way we live, then the cumulative effect can be significant. If we all do one thing to stop contributing to the largely plastic waste that we discard into the environment, then the world has to be a better place.
Hopefully, by making some noise, voting with our discretionary spending, and raising the awareness of the damage being done, someone somewhere in a position to do something about it will hear the message and push for change.
As an electrical engineer I have long seen power grid resiliency as an issue getting a lot of attention. All technology and science is a work in progress. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. However, as MystrD says: that clean energy needs to come from somewhere; and I'll add it needs to be stored in something when the sun doesn't shine or wind doesn't blow. These questions and many others will employ bright minds for decades to come.
Here in CA we see transmission line failures causing catastrophic fires with loss of life and entire communities burnt down.
Rooftop solar is one way to lighten the load on the system but the power companies are becoming frightened of it and are trying to tax and regulate it to death. (The state utility commission is populated by former power company execs.) What they want are square mile solar fields in the desert. That way they keep central control over electricity generation and the ability to charge what they want.
Their idea of "upgrading the grid" is rolling blackouts on high fire danger days.
We don't have a choice. It is adapt or die. Some climate change is going to happen and this is the beginning.
Looking at it from a purely scientific POV, climate change is self limiting. As soon as enough people die off, carbon emissions will drop. There is a natural balance of CO2 and nature will eventually return to equilibrium. It may take decades or centuries.
Some cities will be uninhabitable. Structures will crumble. Foliage will gradually reclaim areas that were logged off/built up/burnt/flooded/eroded away. Kind of like Chernobyl.
There will be more rain overall and it will be redistributed. Even so, while some places will become much wetter, others will become drier. Probably where I live. :(
Climate zones will have moved north. All those cool weather trees in Canada will slowly be replaced with warm weather trees. Violent storms and fires are bad news to us but nature will abide. New growth sprouts up that will be better adapted to the climate. Extinction events are always followed by a burst of speciation, just takes a while. I suspect that "weed" species will do very well while "niche" species will have a hard time of it.
A lot of people don't realize this but we are technically in an ice age. For most of its history the planet was much hotter and rainier - except when everything was buried in glaciers and sea ice. Or the land was entirely arid desert. During the Cretaceous period there were no glaciers anywhere and no ice at either the north or south poles.
Famine might start a nuclear war. Might not be such a bad thing. The radiation will soon subside (Chernobyl again) nature will return and nuclear winter will cool things off a bit.
Another equally beautiful but different world will emerge with a lot fewer people who hopefully will have learned that it is not nice to fool with Mother Nature.
OTOH, we may just technology up, figure out how to extract massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, distribute heat reflective aerosols in the upper atmosphere, and generate terawatt levels of energy without carbon production. I give it a 50-50 shot. Stranger things have happened. We are lucky that the developed world already seems to be on its way to depopulation. China will be at half its current size in the 2050-2070 window.
Russia likes climate change. Siberia may become habitable and the Arctic navigable year round. I don't think Russia sees a downside. OTOH China has a LOT to lose but lacks the will to do much of anything. They need to burn that coal to grow enough to dominate the US.
Or we could all pitch in and lower our energy consumption and demand that government reduce the world's carbon footprint under the Kyoto treaty and then some. (At least the west is making tiny awkward reluctant stumbling steps in the right direction.) Yeah. Like that will ever happen. Humans are great in a crisis but suck at long term planning. Global warming won't feel like a crisis to most until mass depopulation events begin.
No so simple. A couple of years ago I attended a seminar on roof-top solar, including feeding the surplus to the grid. If not done properly it can cause your local transformer to explode turning the power pole into a roman candle. He had some impressive pictures of such unintended fireworks. It's doable, but may require reworking your connection to the utility grid.
Jillian,
I have recently been toying with the idea of a new blog highlighting the many little things we can all do to help the environment. I have a number of ideas, but I fear not enough to sustain an ongoing blog, and I have also struggled to settle on a format that is encouraging without sounding too preachy. For the moment, I have shelved that plan.
As a naturist, my philosophy is more than just living clothes free as much as I can, but also looking at my impact on the environment and trying to live in a way that reduces that impact.
There are many small things we can all do and perhaps should do, to reduce the harm we are doing to the planet. A lot of these steps are hampered by the large companies behind the products we consume, the marketing organisations that advertise these products and the large chain retailers that sell them to us.
There are many things that as a consumer I buy, where I should pay more attention to the environment when selecting my purchase, but often there are no viable alternatives presented to us.
Use a single blade razor rather than throw-away plastic cartridges. Use a shampoo bar rather than buying liquid shampoo in a plastic bottle. Choosing drinks that are sold in glass or aluminium rather than plastic. There are many many other ways we can decide as a consumer not to contribute to the waste we feed the planet every day.
One of the many barriers to making better decisions about the waste we generate in society is the lack of choice that we are given by the large companies selling us our everyday products. Take a walk down your supermarket aisle, where are the non-plastic packaging options? the reusable options? the environmentally-friendly options? Recycled plastic is still plastic, and finds its way into the soil, the waterways and the food chain.
On July 1st 2019, New Zealand banned plastic shopping bags and we are all now happy to take our cotton shopping bags or buy paper ones at the checkout. Our behaviours have changed and we relax patting ourselves on the back that we have done our bit for the environment.
The elephant in the room is that we haven’t even scratched the surface of what we could do, and big retail is not going to make that process easy without additional legislation. Governments are shy about interfering with commercial decisions, and unless there is a vote in it, they are unlikely to stir up too much fuss to change things.
Consumers can do so much, but we also need these large companies to stop creating waste in their packaging in the first place. Perhaps if we all stopped buying drinks in plastic bottles, manufacturers would look for alternative solutions, but as long as they still make money from selling us convenient plastic, nothing will change.
Advertisers are quick to sell us a solution, often to a problem we didn’t know we had, to save time and effort. Sometimes, in order to impact the planet less, we need to put in a little more effort, and that is often the cost of change rather than a financial one. Making your own yoghurt rather than buying a ready-made variety in a plastic tub takes effort. We need to accept that and get on with it.
Sometimes it is less about the big things we do, but the little things that count. Every journey to mass change starts with one person taking one step. If enough people take small steps to change the way we live, then the cumulative effect can be significant. If we all do one thing to stop contributing to the largely plastic waste that we discard into the environment, then the world has to be a better place.
Hopefully, by making some noise, voting with our discretionary spending, and raising the awareness of the damage being done, someone somewhere in a position to do something about it will hear the message and push for change.