this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
87 points (100.0% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5246 readers
354 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As if. The biomass/corn ethanol/HVO/"zero waste" (because we burn it)/... grift(s) will continue for at least another decade.
It's fairly expensive to generate electricity by burning stuff, even biomass. A decent wind, solar, and storage rollout will displace most of it quite cheaply.
The corn ethanol thing is likely to continue in the US as long as we're still burning gasoline in cars.
The massive limiting factor for wind/solar/storage is still capex. Biomass is often labeled sustainable, thus often profits from subsidies, and has low capex. It has high opex and allows for high levels of centralization — which is exactly the kind of business power companies know.
Fwiw, our local utility (mid-sized German town) is currently investing in "green" wood-burning and waste-burning facilities for district heating. It's obvious that none if this is sustainable even as a business because there's simply not enough wood waste in the 200-odd km radius they want to use. There's also not enough household waste in the region for the waste facility. They do it anyway, partly because they're incredibly scared of heat pump economics.
Waste burning at least seems to make sense, if its not burnt its only going to go into landfill and emit methane.
Except, the plant is sized to burn around 8x the amount of household waste produced in the city and regionally, there already are enough waste-burning plants for the current amount of household waste, making this a bet on a foreseeable race to the bottom.
Well yes, that is dumb!
That's actually fine if the landfill has methane extraction systems. The methane can be used to generate electricity