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Yes, that's true, but it made habitable places unhabitable, and excessive global warming would probably do the same for some densely inhabited places. Of course the human race will survive, but there could be hundreds of millions of climate refugees.
point is, there is no way to fight it (assuming it IS happening).
When big powers such as US and China are not interested, a couple of EU countries doing their best won't help much.
For countries like China, India etc, their priority will always be developing, at least for the next 30 years. So many kids in the undeveloped area are making like $1 a day, do you expect local governments to care about environment? And is it fair to impose strict standard to these countries when rich nations plundered them massively only 100 years ago?
In countries like US and Canada, the per capita consumption of resource and emission of GHG is immense, largely due to their car dependent, big house life style. Is it possible to change that and convince them to move to 900sf condos? For Christ's sake, even LA's house are equiped with heating.
I think all this global waming battle will be futile.
could someone post a chart of how America's per capita Co2 emission compares with other countries?
If the world's leader who always acts like morally superior can't even bring its emission to acceptable level, why would any other country want to do that?
If anything, all countries have the right to produce emission to match the US on a per person level.
Geez a quick PM would have been nice, explaining which copyrights I was violating. Then, I would have corrected them, instead of erasing 20 minutes of work....
Oh well....
The point I was driving home was that
A: The emissions per capita are down to 1960 levels and will continue to slide downwards
In fact 10000 nuclear power plants would produce less than half of our energy needs by 2050
Quote:
"That is also the view of energy chemist Nate Lewis of the California Institute of Technology. "It's not true that all the technologies are available and we just need the political will to deploy them," he says. "My concern, and that of most scientists working on energy, is that we are not anywhere close to where we need to be. We are too focused on cutting emissions 20 percent by 2020—but you can always shave 20 percent off" through, say, efficiency and conservation. By focusing on easy, near-term cuts, we may miss the boat on what's needed by 2050, when CO2 emissions will have to be 80 percent below today's to keep atmospheric levels no higher than 450 parts per million. (We're now at 386 ppm, compared with 280 before the Industrial Revolution.) That's 80 percent less emissions from much greater use of energy."
Lewis's numbers show the enormous challenge we face. The world used 14 trillion watts (14 terawatts) of power in 2006. Assuming minimal population growth (to 9 billion people), slow economic growth (1.6 percent a year, practically recession level) and—this is key—unprecedented energy efficiency (improvements of 500 percent relative to current U.S. levels, worldwide), it will use 28 terawatts in 2050. (In a business-as-usual scenario, we would need 45 terawatts.) Simple physics shows that in order to keep CO2 to 450 ppm, 26.5 of those terawatts must be zero-carbon. That's a lot of solar, wind, hydro, biofuels and nuclear, especially since renewables kicked in a measly 0.2 terawatts in 2006 and nuclear provided 0.9 terawatts. Are you a fan of nuclear? To get 10 terawatts, less than half of what we'll need in 2050, Lewis calculates, we'd have to build 10,000 reactors, or one every other day starting now. Do you like wind? If you use every single breeze that blows on land, you'll get 10 or 15 terawatts. Since it's impossible to capture all the wind, a more realistic number is 3 terawatts, or 1 million state-of-the art turbines, and even that requires storing the energy—something we don't know how to do—for when the wind doesn't blow. Solar? To get 10 terawatts by 2050, Lewis calculates, we'd need to cover 1 million roofs with panels every day from now until then. "It would take an army
18250000000 solar roofs covered with solar panels to get 10 terawatts..
10,000 nuclear reactors to get 10 terawatts. Right now there are some 435 nuclear power reactors world wide, with 160 planned and 360 proposed.
We currently consume 16TW in 2011. We will consume at least 28TW by 2050, and more likely much more than that as people who now live in huts without electricity will want to join the modern world.
In fact the OECD energy consumption will not change much of the next few decades
international average?
if you insist US is a developed country, EU average?
Why does the US or any nation need to it's energy production level to some sort of international norm? Do you think that the US has the same sort of energy need as Denmark or even Germany? Apples and oranges.
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