"Dire as it is, the latest IPCC report largely ignores what may be the most significant climate riskβthe risk of self-reinforcing climate feedbacks pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control. So says a team of climate experts, including the winner of the 1995 Nobel for his work on depletion..."
"Some of the world's top climate scientists have concluded that global warming is likely to reach dangerous levels unless new technologies are developed to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere."
"The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says pledges from the world's governments to reduce greenhouse gases, made in Paris in 2015, aren't enough to keep global warming from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees F) above pre-industrial temperatures."
Imagine a town seeking to save water and reduce use of their wastewater treatment plant started shipping all of it’s residents plastic forks, styrofoam plates and sealed bags to put their used toilet paper in and increased trash truck pick up to twice a week, to deal with the increased waste going to the local landfill. Such a scheme would likely reduce the amount of water consumed by residents and the amount of solids received by the waste-water treatment plant. But the cost with a lot more waste going to the landfill.
In many ways, it’s a scheme not unlike geothermal heating or ground source heat pumps. Geothermal heating replaces the on-site combustion of fossil fuels to make heat, steam, and hot water in favor of using a large quantity of electricity produced off-site (often using fossil fuels) to compress refrigerant that either dumps heat into the ground to cool a building the summer or extracts heat from the ground in the winter. It’s a process that moves heat, it’s not unlike conventional heat pumps you see on houses and buildings to do the same but dumping it into the ground which is a more consistent temperature.
Heat pumps are remarkably efficient at raising or lowering temperature in the room, especially when the location they are extracting or dumping heat to is close to the desired room temperature. They don’t generate heat — they just move it from outside to inside or vise versa. But the thing about heat pumps — even they are efficient — they still use a lot of energy as heating and cooling is quite energy intensive. The grid is an ample source of electricity, however if your replacing a system that conventionally used steam or a furnace to make the energy, it can greatly increase the load on the grid to replace those old sources of energy.
Geothermal with it’s high electricity energy demand is not a good mix for off-grid living, and probably not a good mix with a mostly renewable electric grid of future to power our cities, which will certainly need to be be much smaller and efficient then a fossil-grid, especially if we need to drop energy use dramatically in the coming decades to phase out fossil fuels. Simply said, heat pumps are not a long-term solution to decarbonization of society. Rather then investing in electricity-intensive methods of heating and cooling, more should be done to utilize passive solar radiation like south facing windows, improve insulation, stop air leaks — and most importantly a move away from automobile centric transportation.
"If President Donald Trump gets what he wants from OPEC, it might not bring an end to the high oil prices heβs been complaining about for months. U.S. crude futures responded on Wednesday to the news that Saudi Arabia had joined Russia in pumping at close to record levels by rising 1.6 percent to $76.41 a barrel -- the highest since 2014."
"In his 30 years covering the oil market, Jefferies analyst Jason Gammel said he canβt recall ever seeing anything like the State Department request.'
βThis is the lowest level of spare capacity in the global system relative to demand that Iβve ever seen,β Gammel said in an interview on Bloomberg television. βSpare capacity is moving to a precariously low pointβ and $100-a-barrel crude is a realistic possibility, he said."
"Nuclear safety advocates plan a series of events leading up to the March 29, 2019, commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 atomic reactor meltdown, starting with a news conference on Tuesday to call attention to the problem of what to do with radioactive waste."
"Nuclear waste isolation is a discussion that can no longer be postponed," said nuclear safety advocate Eric Epstein, chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, at a Capitol news conference on Tuesday."
"Regardless of whether state lawmakers are able to craft a plan to stop the closure of TMI slated for Sept. 20, 2019, Epstein said there are risks associated with the waste generated from this energy source that will be left behind."
"The industry has failed to deal with the riddle of what to do with the nuclear waste," he said. "Three Mile Island generates 30 metric tons of high-level waste a year. It's been operating for over 40 years. Three Mile Island, an island in a river, is not a radioactive waste site."
