I think we have different sources on that. I've seen viable plans for getting the US onto an all-renewable energy basis over the course of 30 years. The rate may be optimistic, but the energy availability is not. There's more than enough sun, wind, and waves out there, we just have to exploit them.
I've most likely seen your sources. This topic is a small passion of mine. They use unrealistic assumptions and costs that don't consider the lifecycle costs of renewables. Renewable plants currently in operation have serious challenges and rarely (if ever) even boast generation at 50% of their nameplate capacities. Yet most of these proposals do not take real observed efficiencies into account and go with nameplate values. I haven't yet seen a workable plan with realistic numbers that gets us anywhere close to necessary generation numbers.
Cost for solar panels is current at about $6 per watt. So, at 5 hours isolation a day (an average figure commonly used for comparisons, regions vary) you get $6 per 5 wh. US energy consumption per year is about 4.3 TW/h. That means it would cost about $20 trillion to replace baseline consumption with solar. Even if solar become twice as efficient and half the cost, that's still $5 trillion.
Wind is slightly better, with a lower LCOE, but they have a worse efficiency that solar, with windfarms often having throughputs of a quarter of nameplate capacity installed.
Nuclear is prohibitive in part because of how we do it - each reactor is a unique design, that needs an entirely separate certification process, and individuals trained on one plant cannot be used to bring another plant online, or operate it. We can vastly reduce the cost of bringing Nuclear plants on line if we standardize.
Yup, which is why adopting the French methods is a good call. They have standardized designs. One of the big reasons the US has one off designs is that each plant is looking to maximize effectiveness for costs, meaning each is custom designed for the operator. That's because of the huge expense involved in getting a plant online and the time involved with all the government red tape. Also because almost all of the currently operating reactors in the US were built 20+ years ago and there wasn't enough data on effective, repeatable designs yet. The reason for the lack of new reactors? Government.
Of course, we still don't have a good strategy for decommissioning nuclear plants. The amount of problematic waste is considerable, and the lifespan of a fission plant is only a few decades. While we may need to add some nuclear to the mix, the short lifespan of the system makes it a questionable long-term strategy.
Have you actually looked at the lifecycle of renewables? Wind turbines are
lucky to get 20 years.
Solar has, on average, a 10% reduction in efficiency every twenty years. Not counting broken or failed cells, that's fully functional ones.
And, we can't just keep our fingers crossed that fusion will work out.
You seem to be fine crossing those fingers for wind and solar -- two techs that are proven to be unable to meet currently energy needs without additional massive breakthroughs -- oddly enough, in storage rather than the renewables.
No. Once the average person is sold a story about how it is "only a few degrees of warming some time in the future" they are prevented from understanding the long-term cost.
What is the long term cost? All I've seen are guesses.
Current issues in Syria, and the rise of ISIS that came with Syria's issues? Climate change related - Syria was destabilized by massive drought. We can reasonably expect the cost of this to be billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and paying that cost won't even touch the root cause, so it will happen again. Time and again, severe weather swings will destabilize chunks of the world, with similar results.
You know that been strongly refuted by world science groups, and is just an activist talking point parroted by politicians that don't know any better?
There was a drought, yes, and it contributed, but there's no credible evidence that climate change caused or worsened the drought, just as there's no evidence that there's any increase in severe weather phenomenon or droughts anywhere in the world.
As noted - current military expenditures in the Middle East are, effectively, part of your mitigation policy. Heaven help your "mitigation" when a nuclear power (say, India, or Pakistan) suffers a similar problem.
You should bone up on the terminology in use. Mitigation is attempting to reduce carbon to stop or slow global warming. Adaptation is acting to reduce the impacts as they occur.
Delaying mitigation is not really a functional plan - as you continue to burn fossil fuels, the price of mitigation escalates, while its effectiveness declines. Basically, if you want to make sure we *can't* mitigate, then by all means, simply try to adapt. This is a short sighted policy - adaptation is not a one-time payment, but an ever-increasing maintenance cost. If you think mitigation is expensive, then consider that adaptation is basically throwing money down a drain in a way that *doesn't stop the problem*. If your roof it leaking, you can put a bucket under the drip for now. But as the leak spreads and worsens, you have to buy more and more buckets. And the buckets start filling up your floor space. And you have to empty the buckets. And soon, all you have is bucket-management, and no time or money to fix the darned roof!
The Dutch have been successfully and profitably adapting to sea level changes for centuries. It's not an automatically losing strategy. In fact, for it to be a loser, the changes must be severe (unproven), sudden (unproven), and to expensive to adapt to (unproven). Given that changes due to climate are predicted on the span of centuries, there's plenty to do to offset impacts.
A great example is a seawall. If you expect a rise of 20' over 100 years, with a steady increase, then you could either build a 20' high wall right now or build a smaller wall now and increase it's size or replace it as needed. Turns out that unless you have a wealth growth rate of very near zero (or negative, negative is bad), that it's much more cost effective to build a smaller wall and even straight up replace it as needed that to build the big wall up front. While that's comparing two adaptation methods, the fact is that it's generally effective and cheaper to adapt while maintaining economic growth than to mitigate. For instance, if you could spend four times the cost of the wall to attempt to mitigate the rise to 5' or less, you could do that, but it would cripple your ability to build walls if it fails.
No one who supports mitigation is willing to consider the costs of mitigation. It's punitively expensive, reduces living standards, keeps the poor poor, and still might not work. For such a high cost, we really don't understand enough about the system to risk taking that chance and it not working. That world is far worse to think of than one where we plan to adapt.
As far as I am concerned, the only long-term viable carbon sequestration plan will be to bind the carbon into some solid form, not as pressurized gas, for exactly the reasons you cite. Nobody does this because, it is, as I said, energetically like un-burning coal. We don't have the surplus energy to do that at this time.
I have one word for you: plastics!
No, seriously, that's why I conscientiously throw away my plastic bottles rather than recycle them. Hastens the demise of dependence on oil and buries (sequesters) carbon for a long, long time. At least until it get buried deep enough and enough time passes that it turns into oil again.
