Sunday, April 19, 2015

Depressing graph of the day

We will at some point need to talk about the old mayonnaise in new bottle that is "ecomodernism." For today, a pie chart from the IEA that illustrates what is happening in the world while we are distracted by nonsense:

Source 

6 comments:

  1. Coal certainly depressing. Tiny bright spot: "other" including solar and wind 11 times as large in a pie that is more than twice as large. My back of envelope says U.S. wind alone generates as much as burning ~40 million tons of oil annually.

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    1. The "other" piece is growing briskly, no doubt about it. It just feels as though the progress is too slow relative to the cumulative effect of AGW. I mean, imagine if we came back in another forty years and that grow had continued in a similar way. Now "other" is 11-12% of the pie, but it is 2050 already!

      We need to get serious as a civilization about cutting emissions through collective political action, with investment and deployment on a war footing. We don't have an abundance of time.

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  2. Couldn't agree more. So, have you contacted your Representative and Senators to urge extension of the federal tax credit for wind energy? That's a very simple step that would result in a ton of new wind generating capacity being installed.

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  3. Things will turn out ok, because we are running out of fossil fuel reserves. If you consider oil, consumption is much lower as a share of total. Many of you may not realize, but the world's conventional (easy to get) oil production has already peaked.

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    1. We aren't running out of fossil fuel reserves. Not even close. More difficult-to-extract resources are being substituted for easily extractable ones with no end in sight.

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  4. What an encouraging development- Chernobyl and Fukushima have not stopped nuclear power from growing fivefold in four decades, to 4.8%. One encore of the same performance, and coal will be toast come 2053 sooner if courageous greens reflect on the alternatives.

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