"Eliminating that incredible poison, toxic in every stage of its extraction, use, and disposal, to the extent feasible is an obvious priority"

My point, which none of the replies address, is: who is it a priority for? Only for the countries that are doing about 5% of global emissions. Whether we believe there is a climate crisis or not, 95% of the world doesn't, and are acting accordingly.

What people in the English speaking countries need to recognize is that the world is not going to lower emissions. This is not about whether we believe, whether I personally believe, whether there really is a crisis or not.

Its about the simple fact that in 40 years of trying the advocates of the reality of a crisis have failed to persuade the world of their point of view. So any sensible policy has to accept this, and has to accept that global action is not happening and is not going to happen.

This is reality, and its the only sensible starting point for policy discussions. The world in which policy is formulated and implemented will be one in which only supplies of fossil fuel are the limiting factor for global emissions.

Accept this, because its reality. Then figure out whether in such a world your national policies make any sense, what effects if any they will have. The answer will mostly be that they do nothing at all.

For example, the UK is supposedly moving to net zero in power generation, and is also supposedly moving to ban the sale of all except EVs in 2030. The question to ask is: what difference will that make to the world and global emissions in a world in which 95% of the emissions are done by countries who don't care one way or the other and have no intention of reducing their emissions?

The answer is, it will make no difference whatever. Same goes by the way for the US, which has now opted out anyway. No presently proposed policies in the English speaking countries will make the slightest contribution to lowering global emissions. This is the way the world is, whether we like it or not.

Now the question is, why do you still want to do these things? This is the important, hard and inconvenient question. Its analogous to the question about antibiotics. Refusing to treat your child with them will make no difference to global antibiotic resistance. Accept that, because its the truth. Now, why do you still want to refuse?

Time for Slashdot to wake up. Along with the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Rightly or wrongly the vast majority of the world's nations don't believe in any kind of climate crisis. They don't believe there is any 'accelerating rate of climate change'. They don't believe anything much is going on. This includes the ones whose emissions are greatest and fastest growing. And even within the nations whose political leadership does still claim to believe in it, their populations increasingly do not.

Then you have to look at the measures proposed by those of the activist persuasion. They mostly boil down to electrify every use of energy, and get your electricity from wind and solar. Its not happening, and its not going to happen, at least not on any scale that will make any material difference to emissions. Even if you could convert generation to wind and solar, which you can't because of intermittency, that would only reduce 20% of so of emissions. Trying to electrify everything at the same time is just going to produce blackouts and rising prices, and no non-democratic country is going to try it, because they are terrified of the resulting unrest. And because they think its pointless. As for the democracies, any government trying it will just be voted out of office for a generation when the results become clear.

For a case history of how this will play out everywhere its tried, look at the UK.

What do you do about the UN if you are one of the biggest and fastest growing emitters? You send delegations to the climate conferences with a simple set of instructions: to prevent any significant and binding agreements on emission reduction. In which they have succeeded ever since Paris, and they aren't going to stop now.

My suggestion to Slashdot editors is that its time to wake up. First, there is no crisis. But second, even if there were one, there is no program to do anything about it, and there is not going to be. This last is just a fact about the way the world is. You may not like it, but there is no sense denying the undeniable. Its similar to proposing to cut teenage pregnancies by promoting celibacy while leaving current social mores unchanged. Its not going to happen. You may not like it, but if you really want to cut teenage pregnancies, you have to start from the way the world is, not from how you may wish it was.

If you really want to safeguard your population against the supposed climate crisis, do something that is achievable and effective if achieved. Moving your country to wind and solar is not going to work, and if it did would make little or no difference. And stop endlessly lamenting how we are all doomed from emissions with the implication that if we save a few million tons it will make a difference. It won't. Instead figure out what the real danger to our population is, and what is cost effective to do about it.

Global Net Zero is dead. You can tell this by looking at COP and at the policies of the largest and fastest growing emitters. None have any intention of reducing emissions, in fact their universal policy is simple, and consists of two elements:

1) Grow your economy as fast as possible and let emissions go where they may.

2) Attend COP and make sure it never agrees anything binding to do with reducing emissions or fossil fuel use.

Anyone who doubts this just has to look at the record, both of their conduct at COP and at what they are building themselves.

This means that what the English speaking countries do about energy is a matter of energy policy. Its not a matter of climate policy. You cannot have a climate policy when you collectively do about 20% and falling of global emissions, when the 80% are as a matter of policy growing as fast as unrestrained economic growth leads to. Nothing you do in the name of climate has any effect on it. This will greatly upset many people here. But just look up the numbers. What is China, what is India, building in coal fired power plants? How large are their plans in relation to the total power generation from fossil fuels in the English speaking countries? There is your answer. You may not like it, but its a fact.

So you have to look at Australia's situation (and that of the UK, Canada, US) in a different way and ask a different question. That is, are their Net Zero plans a feasible and sensible energy policy in the world as it is? The answer is becoming clear, and its pretty obviously negative. The UK is probably the canary in the coal mine on this. All it has managed to do, at great expense, is try to convert its electricity generation to wind and solar. Leaving untouched all the other sources of emissions. And the result of this has been to raise electricity prices and lower security of supply. Meanwhile it has also tried to close down domestic (North Sea) oil and gas production, and the result of this has not been to reduce demand but has been to increase dependence on imports.

The reason for this is just physics: its intermittency. The problem is the same everywhere in the world, but its most clearly documented on a daily basis for the UK, here:

www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind

There is no way to use such an unreliable supply to power a modern industrial society and economy. You have to get through periods of a week or more, in the coldest part of winter, where peak demand is around 45GW and actual wind output from 30GW installed plant is under 5GW for the whole period and under 1GW for several days within that period. There is no way of managing this.

This of course will not stop the current UK energy minister, Ed Miliband, from keeping on trying it, but the result will be blackouts. It will not stop New York State from keeping on trying it, but its not going to happen. The recent court case in New York shows the same thing - people in charge of policy having committed themselves in law to the impossible can see where its going, namely blackouts, and are frantically looking for the exit.

The best thing that could happen to Australia would be if it too would admit both the impossibility and the futility of Net Zero, make a realistic assessment of what risks global warming really poses to its citizens and society, and take measures to allieviate the worst effects. Which will not include reducing emissions.

At the moment the Western countries who remain committed to Net Zero because climate are like someone who refuses antibiotics for their child on the grounds that there is a global problem with antibiotic resistance. There may be. But you are not going to affect that one way or the other by depriving your child of life saving medication today.

The problem is, most no-one using spreadsheets has any idea they are actually doing programming. In this case, on this scale, real system programming, not trivial scripting. They have never heard of methods and safeguards. Ask them how they document their code and they will stare blankly at you. Ask how they test it, Same. Ask them how they manage versions, same.

The result is their work is full of errors, if you look hard enough. But they have no idea in the maze of loops, iterations and go-tos that their code (which they don't even know is code) is full of.

The fundamental problem is mixing code and data in one object without any space for comments or documentation. Hopeless. If its anything but finance they are doing this with, its a miracle the planes even take off.

I well rememberr a young woman with a liberal arts degree talking to me about her first exposure to spreadsheets. She was absolutely delighted at the power and ease of it. Yes, I said, but be careful, you are actually doing programming. A blank look.

Why spoil the party?

In the UK you can easily pay 75p per kWh, say $1.00, at a public charger.

Still think EVs are cheaper? Pay 50% more to buy one, pay more to insure it, get charged 3p per mile in addition to the high price of the charging....

And why does it cost so much to charge? Well, relatively speaking it doesn't. Its only a bit under 3 x the domestic power rate, which is around 35p.

This is what you get from trying to move the country to wind and solar. Well, that and blackouts, which are coming.

The point of the per mile tax is to replace the tax which is levied on gasoline, when gasoline is no longer used by EVs.

The gas tax does not fund road building and maintenance, its yield is many times greater than the spend on roads, and its anyway not hypothecated.

What you have to pay attention to in this tax is how policy in the UK Labour Party evolves, bu the end goal remains the same. The basic idea is to tax transport. The old way fails, so a new way of taxing transport is introduced. Whether its such a great idea to tax transport to this extent is never discussed.

It was Tony Blair's great achievement and insight to realize that to achieve the goal of an essentially socialist state control of the economy and corporations it was not necessary to nationalize them. Repeal Clause Four, and do the job through regulation and taxation.

We see the same thing on housing. Labour has always hated the private rental sector. But you don't have to abolish it, all you have to do is tax and regulate it out of existence. At that point, and the effort is well underway in the UK, the only rentals will be done by large corporations. You don't have to make private schooling illegal. Just tax the schools, and tax the parents, and no-one will be able to afford it.

In farms, you don't have to nationalize them either. All you have to do tax their inheritance, and you will end up with farming being owned and run by large corporations. Same thing by the way with family businesses of all sorts.

All these businesses should be unionized of course, because the more union members there are, the more campaign contributions can flow in from them. Its also important to increase the welfare class, because this is the main constituency (along with some liberal university towns and the public sector unions). The bigger it is, the more votes.

The end goal is a country in which everyone works for, buys from or rents from one of a few large corporations which are not nationalized but are so closely regulated that formal ownership makes little difference. It is to recreate the GDR on the Thames, complete with denunciations for politically incorrect views and visits from the local Stasi to tell people to straighten up. But I broke no law, you say. They look at you pityingly and explain that this is a non-criminal incident which will be recorded on your file.

And the great thing about this latest way of getting there? The word "socialism" need never be used or even mentioned.

If we had called it "Automated Inference" from the beginning, I don't think we'd be having this debate. The original "bad metaphor" we have been using is "intelligence".

That's too bad. I donated to this project, thought it might do some good, and was excited by the prospect of a clean slate design opportunity. The lessons here are:

1. You don't create new opportunities with information tech, you expand existing ones.
2. Computer skills are essentially manual skills. Doesn't make you smarter, just more efficient.
3. Information tech is overhyped. AI won't make us smarter, either.

Go to www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind to see what is really going on. As an example, this is last year's numbers, day averages:

minimum: 0.16 GW
maximum: 17.342 GW
average: 7.343 GW

This is from about 30GW installed capacity, on- and off-shore. And yes, that was 0.16GW. And if you look you'll see that 10 days or ao under 5GW is not uncommon. 4 or 5 days is frequent. Especially in winter, which, amazingly enough, is when peak demand is.

Whatever /. editors and owners want to believe, you cannot run any number of homes on this. Or anything else either. The best you can do with wind is supplement, at vast expense, reliable power generation which meets the demand in full. As the late great Nora Ephron put it: any dish that is good with capers is better without it. Same with wind. Any grid that works well with wind will work better and cheaper without it, and if you have too high a ratio of wind, it will not work at all.

Every GW of wind that you install has to have the same quantity of dispatchable from conventional. And then you don't need the wind.

You don't believe it, do you? And gridwatch doesn't persuade you. OK, take a look at New York State. How are they getting on with moving to wind and solar? How is the unknown and non-existent dispatchable zero emissions plant coming along there?

This is physics and engineering being done by literature and politics majors, who think you can just cite stats like those in the above piece and that's analysis and proves something.

There was a time when /. would have known better.

"The industry relies on air-separation units, which use giant compressors to turn air into liquid and then distill it into its many components. These machines are responsible for much of the industry's electricity demand, and their use alone is responsible for 2% of carbon dioxide emissions in China and the US, the world's two largest polluters."

In July, the EPA proposed rescinding its rule that CO2 is a pollutant: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.epa.gov%2Fregulation...

It is incorrect to label these countries as "polluters". Carbon Dioxide is not a poison, it is an essential compound that plays an enormously important role in maintaining life on this planet.

No, nuclear is not just like renewables. Yes, a system primarily using nuclear does require supplementing to meet peak demand by gas or coal or a combination.

But, unlike wind and solar, nuclear produces continuous predictable power. The gas generation can be brought in to meet predictable peaks in demand. Wind is neither continuous nor predictable. Solar is predictable but vanishes predictably in winter and at night. And neither one has peaks of production that coincide with peaks in demand.

You want a real life example: look as usual at the UK, who deliver real time statistics on their ongoing slow motion energy policy disaster. Go to www.gridwatch.co.uk, use the menu to look at both wind and solar generation.

It should be obvious that what is going on here is not the supplementing of wind and solar by gas. Its running a basically gas generation system supplemented by wind and solar. Look what happened to UK wind October 11-18. It died. There's about 30GW faceplate installed. The low so far this month was 0.383GW. Nothing like that ever happens to nuclear.

To have a viable electricity grid you have to have adequate dispatchable capacity to meet demand, including peak demand. You cannot do this with wind and/or solar, and you cannot get enough battery storage to do it, and if you could get it you could not afford it.

The choice is very simple, as the UK is going to find one of these winters. You either have full dispatchable capacity, or you have blackouts. Supplement with wind and solar all you want, but supplementing is what you are doing.

The UK is just resorting to the inevitable consequence of trying to close down its dispatchable sources. The plan is to move the country to EVs and heat pumps. But this will of course raise demand, and it will raise it most during December - February. Unfortunately that is exactly when the usual blocking highs appear to the south west, and this leads to calm, cold clear nights. So they are now proposing smart meters which will vary pricing every half hour. The idea is you come home at 5 or 6pm, its dark and cold. You get ready to cook dinner. You look at your smart meter and, guess what, its now costing you ten times the usual rate for boiling that kettle. So you wait and hope the wind picks up again. Which it will, it will.... in a few days time. What do you do till then? Open a tin of cold baked beans?

Any rational inspection of the numbers available in real time from the great UK experiment will show any reasonable person that Net Zero, running the country off wind and solar while moving transport to EVs and domestic heating to heat pumps, and closing down conventional generation, is simply impossible. You can move all right, but the result will be no transport or heating for days on end in the winter, and ridiculously high prices to even light your home or office. Just look at the numbers.

Can't be done. And what cannot be done will not be. But the fallout from the failure is going to be something to behold. No country has ever done itself such peace time self-harm since the Xhosa slaughtered their cattle and destroyed their crops and starved. It is going to be a historic example of human folly for future historians and social scientists to ponder. Why on earth did they do it? I doubt they will find any answer other than that their political and media classes went collectively insane.

"How much is it worth to avoid global warming?"

This is supposed to be an argument for US nuclear generation. The argument, not quite explicitly made, must be that building nuclear would lower or prevent global warming. Thus, however expensive it may be, its cheaper than the alternative, which is higher emissions and higher temperatures driven by them.

But building nuclear in the US cannot have the slightest effect on global warming. It will not affect US emissions materially, but that's not the only problem. Even if it did, it would not affect global emissions. The US economy is too small a percent of the global economy, US emissions are too small a percentage of global emissions, and power generation is too small a percentage of US emissions,

It is a common feature of these discussions on /. -- people assume that unilateral action by the US in some area will have an effect on global emissions and thus the climate. But the alleged effect is never quantified.

If people want to make this argument they should do something they never do: quantify it. Just say what the US is emitting now, then how much it would be given the proposed program, in this case a nuclear build out. Then say what global emissions are now, and what they will be after the buildout. And then say what difference that will make to global warming.

The answer is, negligible effects. But prove me wrong, put up some numbers. At the moment the argument is literary criticism when what is needed is engineering logic.

No, China is under reporting the amount of its emissions.

If it were to report correctly, the emission level would be higher and the sink level staying the same, but the result would be rising ppm.

They do not believe in any climate crisis. But they do believe there is a public relations problem and they are managing it, and very effectively too.

Sorry, simpler than a plug-in hybrid. Not simpler than a plug in EV of course.

There are two kinds of hybrid. One kind is a mild hybrid, which only uses an electric motor to give supplemental power when starting or accelerating. This kind doesn't run completely on battery ever. It is much simpler than any kind of plug in EV because the electric motor is just a bolt on to the existing transmission.

The other kind is a full EV with a smaller battery than a full EV, and in addition a gas or diesel engine. They typically have ranges of about 50 miles on electric.

The point of a mild hybrid is it increases gas mileage, quite significantly. Early Priuses were an example.