Climate change is largely driven by one thing: human activities releasing heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, directly and indirectly. Directly, from burning carbon-based fuels like oil, gas, and coal, and indirectly by things like methane and other gasses leaking from fracking, from melting permafrost, from accelerating decomposition, deforestation, and so on.
Some of these we can address directly, some of them we really can't do much about except by reversing the heating of the planet. If there's one single area where we CAN do something, it's by finding ways to obtain and use energy that do NOT release carbon dioxide (CO2). Solar, wind, wave, hydro, nuclear, using LESS energy (conservation and efficiency) - IF we can come up with better solutions for our energy needs, that alone will make a huge difference.
Despite the best efforts of the fossil fuel industry to keep us locked to carbon as long as possible, things are happening. Business as usual will kill us - IS killing us. BUT - there are some things to keep an eye on. There is more than one path to a future we and the planet can live with; it's a question of are we willing to invest the time, money, and effort needed to carve them out of the status quo?
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
One of the truly maddening things about the United States is that with all of the resources, brain power, and technology potentially at our command, we are doing a piss-poor job of investing in energy, especially if you look at efforts by the federal government. Hobbled and hamstrung by anti-government demagoguery, anti-science know-nothings, faith-based market ideologues, and people with deep pockets, the United States can't even pass a budget anymore, let alone deal with long term challenges.
While Europe has been struggling with really bad economic policies and their own unemployment problems, they've still managed to forge ahead on an experimental energy project that rivals Apollo or the Manhattan Project: ITER. It's a multinational project to build a working thermonuclear reactor that will use nuclear fusion to generate power. To date no one has succeeded in building a reactor that can do it without consuming more power than the reactor creates. ITER hopes to be the first to reach "break even" and go beyond.
Nuclear fusion, if done right, does not need highly radioactive and dangerous fuel, does not produce dangerously radioactive waste, or green house gasses. It does not risk a China Syndrome meltdown, a Chernobyl, or a Fukushima. The fuel is readily available and cheap. It's a big if - but the potential rewards are huge.
If you don't know the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, I wrote up a primer on how it works in Part 2 of a multipart series back in 2008. The ITER project is a gigantic bet that we humans can finally make magnetic fields strong enough to squeeze a super hot plasma hard enough to force atoms together and release energy as they fuse. I went into the details of how ITER works in Part 3 of the series. Hopefully, link rot hasn't destroyed too many of the links in the last 5 years.
(My own personal dark horse favorite continues to be the Polywell Reactor - a completely different approach to nuclear fusion currently being funded by the Navy. Part 4 of my series covered it in detail. The Navy is spending millions compared to billions for ITER. As of August 2012, they'd committed to keep funding the project - so something must be going right...)
The size of the ITER reactor is mind boggling. We're talking about a complex roughly the size of an aircraft carrier, giant super-cooled magnets, and a huge vacuum sealed reaction chamber trying to emulate the sun! A BBC article gives an evaluation of where ITER is at the moment. Concrete is being poured for the foundations; a critical highway is being beefed up to support shipments of components weighing up to 600 tons, and the design of the building is being tweaked to allow the installation of large items in late stages of construction. (The BBC article has photos and an intriguing interactive diagram of the reactor structure.)
The program has had multiple delays, expanding costs, and redesign as the state of the art has progressed. The first plasma might not be created until 2021; ramping up to break-even and beyond will take years as they determine how well the reactor is working, how well it holds up, and whether or not it will need further development. They'll be breaking new ground as they go - with no guarantee of success. There's a painful joke that Fusion is the power of the Future - because it's always 30 years away. Even if ITER succeeds, it may take a decade or two to refine the reactor to something that can routinely generate power.
But here's the deal: even though it's a gamble, the partners involved in ITER have invested a substantial amount of money (the U.S. is involved, but as a minor player - and Congress may cut funding) and they expect to invest years before seeing a pay off. This is something the United States seems to find impossible these days. We abandoned the Superconducting Super Collider, so CERN is where the action is these days. We ended the Space Shuttle program without having anything to replace it. And things are not getting better. (Here and here. Be sure to watch the Lewis Black video at the bottom of the second link.)
Fusion may not be the answer we're looking for, or the only answer - but it doesn't really matter if we as a country can't be bothered to look for ANY answers; one of our two major political parties denies there is even a problem, and the other seems to be afraid to talk about it. It is to be hoped that there is enough sanity left in the rest of the world that it won't matter that we seem to be determined to stay right on course for the cliff.
Meanwhile, I'll have a bit more in a follow-up diary about a couple of other promising developments. (And no, it won't be about Fatbergs or power plants that can run on them...)
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"Green Diary Rescue" is Back!
After a hiatus of over 1 1/2 years, Meteor Blades has revived his excellent series. As MB explained, this weekly diary is a "round-up with excerpts and links... of the hard work so many Kossacks put into bringing matters of environmental concern to the community... I'll be starting out with some commentary of my own on an issue related to the environment, a word I take in its broadest meaning."
"Green Diary Rescue" will be posted every Saturday at 1:00 pm Pacific Time on the Daily Kos front page. Be sure to recommend and comment in the diary.
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