When did "green" get co-opted to mean low CO2 emissions?
It wasn't that long ago we used to worry about whether fuel was renewable or not, and about particulate pollution, acid rain, habitat destruction and other environmental externalities in general, not just CO2.
This global warming-driven definition of "green" ignores all of that.
You can make methane from carbon capture/sabatier reactors. Although I'm not sure if that's any more efficient than desalination/hydrolysis for an H2 plant with fuel cells. In any case, I'm onboard with replacing coal with gas, if nuclear isn't an option. Gas is cheap and fast to build today, and can be supplanted by nuclear/renewable later on. A pragmatic middle ground to (hopefully temporarily) accommodate the nuclear skeptics.
Solar + Batteries/Storage are cheap to build today. No need to choose a worse technology in every way now, that only becomes less viable as time goes on.
And yet the existing battery facilities that could keep a smallish region (or a single city) supplied for 15 minutes or more are exceedingly rare.
Maybe they aren't as cheap as you claim. Australia is recently building a 1200 MW battery in New South Wales for 2.4 billion dollars - a cost comparable to a new nuclear reactor.
The facilities don’t yet exist in large numbers because batteries have only recently become cheap enough to do this cost effectively.
Even the battery factories are in their early stages right now.
Do you have a reference for the storage capacity of that NSW battery? Because every newspaper I’ve found talking about it, only talks about megawatts (power) not megawatt-hours (energy), and it’s the latter which is expensive for batteries, not the former.
My house uses about 500kWh/month, so a typical electric car parked on my driveway for 95% of the time can run it for several days.
20 million cars in the UK are parked on peoples drives overnight. Vast majority don't need a full charge for the following day and people will be delighted to buy electric during the day for 10c/kWh and sell it overnight for 20c/kWh
If they were all electric with 60kWh of storage and can drop to 30kWh that's 600 GWh of storage. The UK's grid usage overnight is about 20GW from memory, so over 16 hours is in the order of 300-400GWh of overnight storage.
Assuming Germany has similar car and demand characteristics, as long as there's enough power during the day to cope with demand and recharging, there should be plenty of storage for overnight usage.
Switching the entire (Western?) car fleet to electric cars will be neither a quick nor a cheap process. It won't even be feasible on a timescale of less than some 20 years, because the necessary amount of natural resources just isn't mined in such volumes. You also have to massively upgrade the grid to handle such powerful currents.
It is doable, yes, but I cannot concur with the OPs idea that it is cheap.
Are you heating up your house with 16.6KWh per day? Seems low for an electrically heated home.
The other problem with using cars to feed the grid is that you need inverters large enough to do so in each house. That's not a cheap solution and it takes a lot of space.
"The spread of projected and reported capital costs is unsurprisingly broad. In Australia the most recent public assessment is
provided by the GenCost2018 report by CSIRO and AEMO.10 It assumes the capital costs for SMR technology is $16,000/kW in
2020 (and experiences no major price decline over time). We note this number is more than double other cost estimates
worldwide. We have sought additional clarification on the basis for this costing. Initial advice is that the number is based on a
GHD estimate for AEMO of costs for a future Gen IV reactor to be constructed in 2035 and not for the type of reactor which
would most likely be deployed in Australia."
Anyhow, that 16k estimate is for power, not for energy... It's unclear over which timespans comparisons are being made (since a lot of it depends for how long power plants will be kept operational... A huge cost is the initial investment).
I've seen energy estimates as low as 30$ per MWh, for Nuclear energy plants built with interest rates of 3%
Don't forget that all other plants except wind require constant fuel. Solar and batteries have negative fuel cost, since solar is free and batteries can store off peak electricity to sell for a higher price during peaks.
Solar + a few hours of capacity are economical viable to run on a day and night cycle. Each day they charge up, and each day they discharge, with a market price that goes up and down in a similar pattern. This is possible for the southern part of EU, but more so in the southern parts of that (Egypt and below).
Further north and solar get displaced by wind as the primary source of energy, and wind do not have a day cycle. It has weeks/months long period of low and high amount of wind. A battery solution that last hours is just a drop in the supply bucket. At the same time, rather than being discharge (and thus generating profits) each day, a wind battery solution will only generate profits a few times each year depending on how large the capacity is. The only way that will be profitable is if it several order times cheaper than the batteries for solar, or if the cost isn't directly linked to capacity. The technology that Germany and other "wind" countries is constantly talking about here is green hydro, but which is yet to be economical viable.
One alternative is to build massive transmission lines from Africa and use solar power + batteries from the Sahara desert, through there are political, technological, and economical problems over designing such energy grid for EU.
Thus for now the political winds are blowing towards natural gas and wind, despite the ecological issues of burning a fossil fuel.
Not true. We have 10kw solar panels with 64x ,280ah LIFO batteries. Even in the winter we manage for 90% using only solar/battery power. We have a detached family house in the Netherlands using slightly above average.
Our monthly bill is about 20 euros max.
I build the entire setup myself for about 10k euros.
I know a person who built a house worth 600k euros for less than 100k euros.
Would you sell your setup for 10k euros, or is the value of your setup possible worth more than the cost of doing it yourself. 10k to be free of the electric company for all future seems like a very good deal if purchasable at that price, and if offered I think there would be quite a few homes willing to take you up on it.
Well it's almost enough. we don't have gas. Everything in the house is powered by electricity. Either from solar, battery or grid. So 10% still from grid. I am going to solve that by putting another 20 panels on the Northside of the roof. Not efficient, but maybe enough to cover the last 10%
Battery storage is profitable if you can sell for more than you buy. It just needs to be connected to the grid and not necessarily connected to a particular generator.
Although battery storage may still be located close to generation. One benefit of this is that you get more benefit from your grid connection. Without batteries you can just export for a part of the day. With batteries you can export when it is sunny/windy, export when it is dark/not windy, and even import energy when wholesale prices are cheap. The expensive grid connection is better utilised.
Solar dropped below 2c/kWh in the kind of places you should actually install solar. It depends on interest rates but that’s shockingly low. Batteries provide peaking power cheaper than any rarely used peaking power plant. (2,000 charge cycles on a 100$/kWh battery charged from 2c/kWh solar is ~7c/kWh whenever you need it.)
That’s all it takes for adoption to dramatically increase. Market forces will shift things around as ever more solar comes online, but as long as daytime rates are above nighttime rates solar is an obvious win for electric companies.
> 2,000 charge cycles on a 100$/kWh battery charged from 2c/kWh solar is ~7c/kWh whenever you need it.
Well - no.
The $100 is up front capex. Add interest rate over 10 years and the price doubles. This is just the module/pack price, and you need to add installation, cabinets, fire suppression, AC/DC and controllers. Which probably add 50% to 100%.
Like wise the headline 2c/kWh is probably for ideal projects with ideal land/transmission/regulation/geography. It is also 70% generated in summer, and only 30% in the winter months.
Renewable energy is important, getting cheaper and accelerating and This-Is-Good (TM), But real physics and economics still matter.
2000 cycles is 5.5 years at one cycle per day, though 2 cycles per day can also be useful at the cost of a very short lifespan. Even 5% interest rates above inflation only increase costs by around 14%.
At scale batteries are effectively a fuel that needs continuous replacement, though related equipment can last much longer. Also, module/pack prices dominate installation and operating costs as PV operates on DC and therefore needs a DC/AC converter etc.
Summer vs winter depends on geography, it’s largely meaningless between the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. It does become increasingly important further north, though offset by the relative need for AC. By the time you’re seeing such wide production swings from summer to winter you are simply in a bad location for solar.
PS: Actual charge vs discharge cycles of course vary widely as to various other costs.
Those are the wrong units in two different ways at once.
KW = power, kWh = energy = integrated power over time
Batteries are reusable. I see claims varying from 2,000, to more than 10,000 times. That reduces the battery cost to between €0.0525 and €0.0105 / kWh.
If 1kWh of gas is 6 cents, and a 1kWh battery is $100 and lasts for 10,000 cycles, that puts the price of the battery at 1 cent/kWh plus the charging cost (2c/kWh for solar)
In addition, for Europe, the key part of removing Russia from the energy equation is worth a hell of a lot of money.
I hate to say it. I am not pro Russia at all, but its mainly the US who wants Russia to be removed so they can sell their goods to Europe. There no other reason. Luckily we see a larger movement of people recognizing this annoying behaviour of the US.
Unfortunately the math is meaningless if it takes 10 000 years to get those 10 000 cycles. Batteries are currently competitive for short response times and short cycles. As price declines they become become useful for longer cycles, but there will be a point beyond which we need alternative solutions, such as bulk storage/gas, long transmission lines, and/or demand management.
I expect most (but not all) of the batteries in a PV+battery grid would be cycled (to whatever depth) every day, giving them a ~27 year replacement cycle not too different from other power plants.
In principle I prefer antipodal transmission lines for the grid and batteries for transport — grid is cheaper and a trade opportunity — but at global scale, such a grid will take a while to build.
I can follow that, but isn't this problematic when there is a power needed when there is no wind/solar available for recharging and you still need more?
e.g. we would need a much larger energy storage, than for gas?
Germany currently generates 50TWh per year of solar
On average that's 136GWh per day, lets assume that was spread so that it's say 36GWh per day in winter and far more in summer.
It consumes 500TWh a year.
Lets assume consumption is 1,400GWh per day evenly across the year. Consumption is higher in the day, so even with shorter days in winter lets make that half during daylight and half at night, 700GWh each.
If Germany increased its solar to 50 times as much as it currently has to generate 1800GWh a day in winter, it would require 700GWh of storage and a total of 1400GWh during the day.
There are 48 million cars in Germany, lets assume that 65% of them are parked overnight and connected to the electric grid, making it 30 million cars. Make them all electric, with with about 30kWh of "flexible" capacity for draining overnight (50% capacity) and filling up in the day per car. That's about 1,000 GWh of storage available overnight, enough to provide for the entirety of German electric consumption overnight.
During the summer when solar capacity would be three times as much, that excess capacity could be used to generate green hydrogen through electrolosis, used to do things like aluminium production, could be exported to neighbouring countries.
Now sure switching cars to fully electric would increase total usage of energy, about 2,000 kWh per car per year, say 100 TWh a year extra, but then there's a lot of wind generation in Germany (>100TWh) now which would offset that.
> Although I'm not sure if that's any more efficient than desalination/hydrolysis for an H2 plant with fuel cells.
One can make more than methane. Heavier liquid fuels like methanol, which is a great gasoline analogue, can also be synthesized.
Theoretically speaking, the most efficient way to split water is thermal decomposition at really, really high temperatures, with a catalyst. I've seen a variety of proposals to split water into hydrogen and fix the H2 as a hydrocarbon, with direct heating from both concentrated solar and nuclear. I don't know about the practical economics, though.
The trouble is that these hydrocarbon will just be burned like all others, causing GHG release.
If you want something actually green, try ammonia via electrochemical methods, from hydrogen.
This is also why these gas investments are a trap. We're already generally low on gas for winter and increasing the intake will not help, plus any operational emissions is too much and has to be optimized. 270 g CO2e is a plenty in a series of small deployments to ruin the targets.
If methane is manufactured from CO₂ and H₂O, there is no net GHG release, it's just storage, same as ammonia or pure hydrogen (though large methane leaks would be a problem).
IMO, methane is good, if we are actively transitioning to manufactured methane. It's a plug-in substitute with existing distribution networks, storage and consumers, easy and cheap to handle. Though efficiency is pretty bad, so it's mostly good as cheap bulk storage.
Methane is not manufactured from straight gases. Usually it is either mined or steam reformed from oil or coal. You can see the problem - mining with concomitant pollution and release of previously bound CO2 when it's burned.
Attempting to do pure electrochemical reforming is extremely energy intensive, and requires rare metal membranes. As well as a way to concentrate CO2 from atmosphere reliably. (The Sleipnir problem.)
I am well aware methane is not currently generated from CO₂, as we are still using fossil fuels, not generating enough surplus energy to make the reverse process economical.
Do you have any numbers on synthesis energy efficiency? It is inherently energy intensive, as it is storing energy. Rare metal membranes may be current state of the art, but Nickel catalysts seem a popular alternative.
> It wasn't that long ago we used to worry about whether fuel was renewable or not, and about pollution and other environmental externalities in general, not just CO2.
These are the same thing in common parlance. High CO2 emission plants are fossil fuel driven, and those are of course non-renewable.
Wind, solar and nuclear are renewable, sustainable and low CO2. Nuclear in particular also produces very little waste as a function of power generated and extraction of uranium from seawater could fit the renewable definition.
There will almost always exist solutions that are greener than natural gas. The practical reason to choose natural gas over those are costs, sacrificing the environment in order to save money.
> It only gets the label if it's greener than existing solutions. They're not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
That sounds very idiotic to me. One of the biggest environmental threats is global warming, which is caused by reintroducing carbon into the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels. It makes no sense at all to label fossil fuel usage as green just because they manage to come up with an arbitrary line in the sand for unrelated pollutants and in the process ignore carbon emissions.
It's caused by an ever increasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and it's solvable by drastically decreasing that amount. Its origin is nowhere in that equation.
> and in the process ignore carbon emissions.
Natural gas is the best of the worst, and it contributes to the solution in the specific case where it replaces even worse options (like coal plants). I'd argue that <270g CO2 per kWh is far too high of a threshold, but that's still at least a half of what even the "cleanest" coal plants produce per kWh.
It's not the best solution and nobody is arguing that, but it is a solution in very specific circumstances.
> They're not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
The best you can do sometimes, its just to be less bad.
If you can replace coal or diesel powered power plant into modern gas powered plant, you will emit a lot less CO2 for equivalent power.
Solar and wind are not enough jet. We need something that can produce electricity 24 hours a day, or on demand. The "greenest" such tech are nuclear and gas.
I have high hopes of geothermal, maybe replacing a lot of gas, but we are not there jet.
The threat is humanity. The amount of pollution that will ultimately be created by the gas plants is a drop in the bucket compared to humanity overall and will largely be offset by renewables.
There's 5.5 million tons of known uranium reserves. If you took our current reactor fleet and replaced it with fast breeders, this would supply it for 30,000 years. There's also 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater. Then there's thorium.
You're missing that.
Technically not renewable, but in the long run, neither is the Sun.
It's not that bad, currently at breakeven point for laser fusion and close to that for magnetic containment fusion. Half a century should be enough, but we lack the time.
Breeder reactors can create more fuel, but even without these, there is a substantial amount of uranium that this is a non-issue. By the same token, solar is also non-renewable since it requires real resources mined from the earth which are in finite supply and solar panels are not 100% recyclable (and especially not the batteries required to make solar reliable). In this sense, nothing is renewable -- even hydro will run out eventually when the earth cools and plate tectonics comes to an end.
Anyway, nuclear is never included in the "renewable" bucket, because the fuel has to be harvested and doesn't renew on a human timescale. Nuclear is green, because its net emissions are almost zero.
OTOH burning wood is renewable, but not green, and also not sustainable. So nothing inherently good about being renewable.
It's pointless to have a practical classification to then come with "technically..." and some weird and unpractical reason.
> Anyway, nuclear is never included in the "renewable" bucket, because the fuel has to be harvested and doesn't renew on a human timescale.
You can make the case that it does - if you count uranium in seawater. Theres enough dissolved there now to fuel all the reactors on earth for 60,000 years. Geological processes continually replenish the dissolved uranium.
Yes, and you can argue that coal and oil are currently being created... very slowly... from dead trees and what not. So renewable vs non-renewable doesn't make any sense anymore.
Lets make another name: "energy which source can get replenished in less than 100 years (a life time), as wood, or less, as solar, wind, waves, and can be practically harvested with current methods i.e. not fussion or matter dissolved in the sea". That's the whole phrase you should use from now on instead of "renewable".
Solar isn't something that can ever be replenished. There's a fixed quantity of fuel in the sun. Once it burns out, it's gone. That provides the input energy into the process for solar, wind and wood.
With breeder reactors the uranium in seawater would last us 15 million years at current nuclear power consumption levels. If that's not renewable...
I though it was already clear that we were talking human scale. And you still talk about 4,500 million years as non-renewable, but 15 million years (plus 100% magic ocean harvesting) as renewable. At no point anybody said "infinitely renewable", and you arguing it makes that a strawman argument.
Renewable is defined, like it or not, as a source that replenishes in a finite human scale (roughly, 50-100 years). Sun, waves, hydraulics and wind "replenish" everyday. Wood takes about 30 years. If you find yourself saying things like "15 millions years" or "60,000" years, it's not renewable.
> solar panels are not 100% recyclable (and especially not the batteries required to make solar reliable)
While I can believe that we don’t have a current recycling chain set up for these, I absolutely do not believe that they are genuinely non-recyclable.
We make both of these out of a variety of literal rocks, extracting trace elements and purifying them greatly in the process of manufacture. Even in the worst case, it’s easier to start from the end products than from rocks.
Nothing is indefinitely renewable. In the end, the second law of thermodynamics is an immovable barrier. When we talk about renewable, it's never endless, it's renewable within reason.
When it comes to nuclear though, the people claiming it's renewable usually refer to the presence of uranium in seewater, which is leeched from the ocean floor. That fits within the "renewable within reason" frame I talked about before. The issue with making that case is that collecting uraium from seawater is experimental reearch at this point ; it's definitely not an industrial process. Other examples of people conflating research with established industrial standards include people claiming we can get rid of nuclear waste with new reactors, or people claiming that we can recycle wind turbine blades.
A reasonable case to be made is that, while nuclear is not renewable, the reserves we have is enough to let us buy another century of research and a reasonable chance to find more long-lasting solutions, whether it would be a great storage technology, fusion, new fission technology, a smart grid or whatever.
Nuclear is definitely sustainable [1]. There's at least four billion tons of Uranium dissolved in seawater, enough to power humanity until the heat death of the universe [+]. We just have to figure out how to get it out. [2] The amount in the ocean is constantly replenished through geological activity so one could even make the case its renewable too.
[+] There's 5.5 million metric tons of known uranium deposits. Switching to breeder reactors, which produce more fuel than they consume, would allow that supply to match current generation capacity for 30,000 years. Then there's the 4.5 billion metric tons in seawater. That'll get us 15 million years worth of power.
> This global warming-driven definition of "green" ignores all of that.
No, it just shows that one needs to read more than the headline. It does take all that into account as well, hence all the "if"s and the "transitional" label.
If someone has better ideas how to progress and unite 27 countries with different levels of transition challenges and different views on nuclear and other sources, please submit them.
Otherwise, being pedantic and negative about non-perfect solutions while not taking into account the complexity of getting a consensus with 27 members is not helpful to anyone.
Because we have specific environmental problems right now, that are quite serious and worth focusing on?
You do this stuff because you want to accomplish something. If animals go extinct, that is obviously unfortunate, but it pales in comparison to the prospect that we do so.
The EU isn't trying to accomplish some type of perfect environmental justice, they're trying to keep the world habitable.
> If animals go extinct, that is obviously unfortunate, but it pales in comparison to the prospect that we do so.
I agree with the global sentiment of your comment, but let's not forget that animal extinction is 1/ well on its way and 2/ a direct precursor of human extinction.
That is counter productive to keeping the earth habitable. This "considered middle ground" ideology is more dangerous than denial. Like MLK said about "white moderates".
The required reduction is 99.9% of greenhouse emissions for the next millennium. No institution has ever had that power, few have lasted that long, and even those few which have lasted that long underwent significant policy changes in that time. If we can’t make saving the planet cheap enough that even the greedy and selfish prefer to do that, then we can’t win at all.
But half-arsing it now gives us more tomorrows in which to create the better solution.
Maximally 10 extra years and waste of a lot of labor and money that could be put into building and developing nuclear power plants and more renewables.
It would take mere months to open back up those plants recently closed. Back in the 70s they could construct plants in 2-5 years. Chernobyl 1 began and completed construction in the same year!
Has our technology gotten worse since then? Or is it just permits and bureaucracy impeding us?
MLK’s problem with white moderates was not being a middle ground, it was that they urged delay and inaction.
> I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
Indeed, he himself was charting a middle ground between inaction and violence:
> You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."
I have been gravely disappointed with the climate moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the planets great stumbling block in his stride toward salvation is not the Oil Industry or the Coal Barrons, but the political pragmatist, who is more devoted to "order" than to climate justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action(Roadblocks etc)"; who arrogently believes he can set the timetable for preventing ecosystem collapse; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the wildlife to wait for "better economic conditions." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
The middle ground between inaction and violence (blowing up a pipelines & boardrooms) is not classifying gaseous hydrocarbons a form of "green energy.
That's a misrepresentation of what they did. They said it was OK if it replaced certain stuff temporarily, not that you could just keep on building gas plants for ever and ever.
The recent attention that "the environment" has been getting is a direct result of this, and you mustn't confuse it for a general interest in green politics.
Frankly, I really do not care about "the environment". I care about people, and they obviously have a need for the environment. But the reason we have to take climate action is that it would be unpleasant for people's lives if we did not, not because it would hurt the trees.
If you suggest to reduce people into poverty so that they do not suffer extreme weather, is this really an improvement? Or are some people to be reduced into poverty, so that some other people do not suffer extreme weather?
If the trade-off is that I do not have a job, a place to live, heating, electricity, etc, but the weather is normal, I think I would prefer to have wildfires and flooding but otherwise a normal life. Most people would sooner live in California or Florida or Australia than Belarus or Moldova, no?
(That's not to say all action on climate policy looks like this. But when you have people talking about "degrowth" or blowing up oil pipelines, that very much seems to be the ethos. Lebanon had to make an unplanned transition away from oil on short notice. Should we strive to be like them?)
Its energy is "greener" than that of coal, or heavy oil: more energy is released per a CO₂ molecule produced. Also, unlike coal, it does not produce radioactive ashes.
But it's not carbon-neutral, of course. I'd call this "olive" or "lime" energy: greenish but not wholly green.
This is as close to arguing about what colour to paint the deck chairs on the titanic as I can imagine.
A non-carbon neutral source of energy is not any shade of green, until we’ve averted the upcoming climate disaster. And then maybe we can debate about how to spend our limited carbon budget.
> until we’ve averted the upcoming climate disaster
Realistically, not going to happen. We might be able to mitigate it, but not avert it.
The best strategy is to plan it live with it rather than trying to avert it.
The best strategy is to stop CO2 emissions as fast as possible. We already did enough damage that we'll need mitigation strategies in the future, every ton of CO2 we add to the atmosphere makes mitigation more expensive. Climate change is not some binary thing which you either prevent completely or don't. It just gets worse and worse proportional to how long we keep burning fossil fuels.
If it only went proportional... The results are closer to logistic with some stability islands, exceeding certain thresholds causes runaway changes moving the equilibrium up. And there are some terrible end game scenarios we do not want to ever reach, such as exceeding wet bulb temperature in most living and farming places - cooling requires huge amounts of energy in scale. Exceeding that would make many places unlivable without technological support.
Then there's the ultimate point where hydrological cycle stops, causing runaway drying.
I think that depends on what you count as “disaster”. Some stuff is certainly baked in, but we might yet be able to stop short of what I think of as a disaster.
I’m not certain we will — problem and solution are both exponential — but I certainly think it’s plausible.
In Germany "green" meant diesel with salad oil mixed in before our politicians started to focus on electric cars. Everything renewable qualifies as "green" even its worse for the environment.
> It wasn't that long ago we used to worry about whether fuel was renewable or not, and about particulate pollution, acid rain, habitat destruction and other environmental externalities in general, not just CO2.
From these points natural gas is relatively good, its main problem is CO2 emissions. I worry that focusing on CO2 would lead to going back from natural gas heating to biomass/wood heating, which could be CO2 neutral[1], but brings particulate pollution and other environmental externalities.
[1] although often is not due to extraction and processing steps
“Green” is a marketing term designed not to promote any particular source of energy but rather to paint existing sources as “not green” which implies bad.
Ah yes Russia has limitless amount of money to control the EU despite having the GDP of Italy.
Putin is personally sabotaging the magical technology that can replace natural gas instantly!
The real reason why we're dependent on gas is because the eco warriors shut down coal powerplants and nuclear has been dead since 1987. Don't blame Russia for our own incompetence.
It wasn't that long ago we used to worry about whether fuel was renewable or not, and about particulate pollution, acid rain, habitat destruction and other environmental externalities in general, not just CO2.
This global warming-driven definition of "green" ignores all of that.