Thanks for watching! Weathered: Earth's Extremes is everything you love about Weathered but bigger and better. Across 6 incredible episodes, Maiya and the Weathered crew travel around the world to tell the definitive story about our changing weather and climate, and how a better future is within reach. This is only one of the episodes -- to support Maiya and the team (and help us make more of this show), you can watch the rest for free RIGHT NOW on the PBS App on your smart TV, phone, tablet or streaming device: to.pbs.org/PBSAppWeathered And if you're outside of the US and want to watch the show, you can check it out on PBS.org here: www.pbs.org/show/weathered/ Maiya and the team worked so hard on this special show -- we can't wait for you to watch it! -Team Terra
I have lived for thousands of years, I will and have observed, witnessed, and been part of the whole of existence. I will always love you. I wish I could bring you with me.
The U.S. isn't building any more coal fired power plants because they are uneconomic, but we are building more natural gas fueled Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plants. The good news, if any, is that they have greater thermal efficiency (50-60%) than coal fired plants. The bad news is that the natural gas infrastructure still has far too much leakage (over ~4% and it is worse than coal) to make natural gas a more climate friendly solution to the crisis.
@@willjapheth23789Methane is hundreds of times more potent as a greenhouse gas prior to it breaking down in the atmosphere. And when it does break down, much if it reverts to CO2. How is that better?
@DirtFlyer 120 times about, but co2 is a long-term risk that won't go away. CH4 is much more carbon efficient than coal is, so we can see emission reductions just from switching to gas. In 70 years, today's CH4 will be meaningless compared to today's CO2. Both need to end eventually, but coal is worse.
@@willjapheth23789 if we hadnt already used our entire carbon budget. 25 years ago gas was probably a good transistional investment. We no longer have the headroom for new fossil fuel plants. Most new gas infrastructure is either doomed to be stranded assets or our climate is fucked.
In idaho 70% of our power is from renewables. And the power company plans to be completely coal free by 2030 and emission free by 2045. If idaho can do it any state can do it.
@@TheRealSnakePlisken I'd imagine some amount of fossil fuel energy was used to prevent a larger amount of fossil fuel energy from being needed in the future.
@@TheRealSnakePlisken This isn't the gotcha you think it is. "You used our current infrastructure to build a better, less polluting infrastructure! Therefore..." What? Hypocrisy? Is that the goal, accusing hypocrisy? All this reveals is that you and the industries you're toadying for can't or refuse to understand how basic reality works. Nobody is going to build clean energy starting from square one. Pretending that's a reasonable expectation and barking like a dog about infrastructure that isn't is ridiculous - the target of ridicule.
The LA fires were caused primarily by Democrats and environmentalists ! ! ! - Not cutting underbrush and clearing the land of dead wood and not allowing regular burn cycles to clear out the dead vegetation! j- Not allowing all the normal run off water from Northern Kalifornia to reach Southern Kalifornia not to mention the water is desperately needed by the farmers in the Central Valley!
@@LWRC Stop with the lies about "environmentalists about Not cutting underbrush and clearing the land of dead wood". The SAME propaganda script was used for the Australia 2019-2020 fires. Here's the red flag, the propaganda kept calling it WILD Fires. That is the wrong term for Australia, it's BUSH Fires. Foreign trolls were spamming misinformation.
@@LWRC Stop with the LIES about "Not cutting underbrush and clearing the land of dead wood and not allowing regular burn cycles to clear out the dead vegetation". That was the same script used on the 2019-2020 Australia Fires. The massive Red Flag was the foreign trolls kept calling it WILD FIREs. The wrong term because the foreign trolls have no clue what they are talkimg about. FYI It's BUSH Fires.
@@LWRC Stop with the FALSEHOODs about - Not cutting underbrush and clearing the land of dead wood and not allowing regular burn cycles to clear out the dead vegetation. That was the same script used on the 2019-2020 Australia Fires. The massive Red Flag was the foreign trolls kept calling it WILD FIREs. The wrong term because the foreign trolls have no clue what they are talking about. FYI It's BUSH Fires. You are just another foreign troll.
In most areas renewable generation is cheaper than fossil fuels in the long term and are getting closer to the initial costs, and they are tending to last longer than initially expected so the long term costs are also dropping.
That a bunch of nonsense! The energy densiry of fossil fuels is far greater than any li-Ion battery or solar panel output efficiency at about 13%! And that doesn't even factor the costs of raw ore mining and fabrication costs of these two power sources!!!
@@AzrethK9 The energies going into making the solar panel not to mention all the raw materials, especially rare earth elements, must be MINDED! Those energies are NOT FREE ! ! ! Solar panels barely last 10 years and then become toxic waste. The manufacturing of solar panels generate tons of toxic waste that must be hauled away from the plant! Not every location in the US can rely on solar panels for power generation! So if you want to go down this green energy path, then stop using all the consumer products that you have today because they ALL came from fossil fuels ! ! !
@AzrethK9 The solar panels are made from energy! Not only production but the raw ore mining of the rare earth elements needed also require huge amounts of energy! There is no free lunch in energy conversion ! ! ! Solar panels barely last 10 years and then they become toxic waste! Not every location in the US nor around the world can use solar panels as a reliable source of energy production ! ! !
@@AzrethK9 A lot of fossil fuels get burnt to make the solar panel and there are no ways to replace them; the necessary process heat cannot be generated in any economically scalable way without coal. Lots of coal. Same for steel and cement.
This is a really well put together video! Love how you have a sort of cautious and grounded optimism that acknowledges the awful damage that climate change will cause while still lauding the progress we have made so far. We need a green new deal here in the states!
Americans don't lose hope. What the media and influencers won't tell you is that the rest of the world, even China, are moving forward. We actually ARE the exceptional country in this case.
That still doesn't refute the fact that energies for 'charging' these battery cars still come from fossil fuels ! ! ! Solar panels? How many days will you have to connect a car to get it fully charged from these panels alone? 3 weeks??!!! Remember, panels only put out enough barely to supply energy through inverters to power 120VAC and the chargers these battery cars require are high power chargers running at 480VAC with high current ! ! ! It will take weeks for a car connected up to only solar panels to charge from 1% to 100%!!! You people supporting this have no clue what you are even talking about ! ! !
The United States is doing more than what the news says. Wisconsin has gotten rid of all but one coal powerplant now. They will all be shut down soon. There are also a ton of solar farms going up.
@@LWRC Your ignorance is astounding. A 10 KW solar system will produce about 60 KWh of energy over a day. Put half that into your EV and you will have half charged the EV in one day. This is more than enough for the average driver. As the grid goes more and more towards renewables the charging for EVs will become cleaner and cleaner. Here in my state of South Australia, home to the world's first big battery built in 2017, over 70% of all electricity used by both domestic and industry now comes from wind and solar exclusively. The state government here has plans for this to become 100% by 2030.
Ever heard of a super cool energy type known as nuclear fission? Yeah thats the solution, I agree at least with xurrent tech efficiency, solar and wjnd cant sustain our needs alone thats why nuclear power is so important for us humans, fission till we figure out fusion And complimenting it with solar and wind While still easing the climate crisis by lowering coal and fossil fuel usage @LWRC
I used to drive a gasoline engine car that used 500 gallons a year which emitted (@20 lbs of CO2 per gallon) 10,000 lbs of CO2. And my San Francisco home HVAC heating used 400 therms of natural gas per year which produced (@12 lbs of CO2 per therm) 4800 lbs of CO2. This totaled ~15,000 lbs of CO2 emissions per year. Now, I drive an EV car, installed a heat pump for my house HVAC heating and changed to an all electric kitchen. All of these are now powered by my rooftop solar panels. So now my CO2 emissions or carbon footprint is essentially ZERO (except for a hot water heater which soon will be changed to a heat pump). CO2 greenhouse effects are causing extreme weather events such as hurricanes, heat waves and wildfires (ex. Florida, Las Vegas, Colorado and Los Angeles). I urge everyone to reduce their CO2 emissions. Note that switching to green appliances and solar power is expensive, but Biden’s energy tax credits and rebates have been helpful.
@@TheRealSnakePlisken The amount of energy used to build and maintain those devices is many times less than the total lifetime emissions of continued use of a gas car and natural gas heating.
It’s hard to wrap our heads around how technology disruption S-curves work, even while we’re now entering the steep part of the solar/battery adoption disruption curve. It’s hard to grok exponential behavior. Few people have ever heard of Wright’s Law, but Wright’s Law is now driving the world to renewable energy faster than even the most optimistic believed just a few years ago. Wright’s Law says that production costs of manufacturing decline with the volume being manufactured - each doubling of production causes a fixed percentage of cost reduction. Solar power has steadily dropped 20% in price with each doubling of production - and it has doubled every 2-3 years since the 1970s! In recent years, doubling cycles have been less than two years, each one dropping prices another 20%. So the cost of solar panels is dropping nearly 90% every decade now! Lithium batteries have seen a similar exponential price curve - they’re now 97% cheaper than they were in the early 1990s. So a few years ago, solar panels became the cheapest source for raw electricity in the world. This contributes to explosive growth, keeping the pace of the doublings. Now, batteries are getting so cheap that it’s now cheaper to just buy batteries to keep the grid going overnight and some solar panels just to charge them, than it is to pay for fossil fuel to produce the same electricity for 20-30 years. Lots of people look at the state of the grid today and think “See, solar and batteries don’t really matter”, but they’re not thinking about the exponential rate of adoption, or the exponential drop in prices. It’s not about where we are now, it’s about where we’re going - what will the grid look like after 20 more years of this?
Explosive growth of industry is exactly what the problem is. This culture will destroy ecosystems just as fast with solar and lithium batteries. You are an idiot. Thanks for sharing.
That's a load of BS. When the sun don't shine and wind don't blow it's usually fossil power that keeps the grid working. Germany already did your fantastic experiment replacing a butt load of nuclear with solar+wind + MASSIVE BROWN LIGNITE COAL plants because greens get upset with the ATOM. See Wikipedia for Per Capita Energy Use by country to see the magnitude of the problem. US is 300GJ per capita, that's the same as 300 solar panels per person. See also LLNL Energy Flow Graph to see how primary energy is sourced by country and US state. See also Without The Hot Air by physicist David MacKay
_In the 1970s we didn't expect the changes to start _*_*until the 2300*_* WHO said "2040s" - at this time? The speed up in the eighties were not foreseen - same with 2000. The JUMP in 2023 is still not understood.
The Limits to Growth published in the 70s predicted a time of transition noticeable before 2040. The "pollution" curve captures GHG emissions and their impact quite well.
@ Limits to growth - didn't covered climate change at all. I remember they've foreseen a total collapse til 2070. Which fits with 2040 and a "transition noticeable"
so how do we stay optimistic now that we have an administration that no longer cares about climate change, renewable energy and even pulled us out of the Paris agreement AGAIN? Can we even survive the next 4 years of back sliding the progress that has been made, however little it was in the first place? I'm really asking for some hope I guess.
I think the world largely realizes this problem and is making improvements abroad. Unfortunately the US will just not be a leader on this. I wish US lawmakers would realize there is opportunity in this.
The energy transition is too far along for Trump and his MAGA cult to stop. It will continue because it is the cheapest form of electric generation, and EVs are the cheapest cars to own long term, as well as the most fun to drive. It will continue because the rest of the world is not stupid. They want clean air and a livable planet.
Donald Trump is a very simple man as are most republicans, (not an insult), these people tend to support nuclear energy because something in their mind intuitively understands energy density, while the much more edumacated dems go for the shiny tech that is really low energy density and is silicon tech dense. The Per Capita Energy Use (see Wikipedia) of Americans is about 300GJ/yr, that could all be made with solar panels, each panel kicking in 1.1GJ a year.That comes to 300 panels per person. It does not include the cost of balancing day and night or winter summer or of rebuilding it all every 20 years or the tremendous new eWaste stream. Now Biden did support nuclear too, he just could not bring himself to utter the words in front of the edumacated supporters who only want to hear about solar and wind and batteries. And batteries at scale is a whole other toxic subject, on the minerals front.
Deny delay distraction, yet during the current CO2 concentrations the sealevel was 200 ft higher.in the past. Take all the time you need to let this sink in.
@@MyLoganTreksyawn. Is there a chemist in the house? How did the greatest flourishing of life on this planet, the Cambrian, ‘suffer’ exuberant growth at 6,000+ppm? The CO2 rule of thumb I learned is for every 100ppm added there are diminishing returns - rapidly approaching zero. It’s logarithmic describing the upper limit of what CO2 can even reflect. Scary IPCC bed-time stories has people peeing their bed over the number 450ppm and Steve is glad to pick up what Bosses lay down. Mankind is so very mighty the earth trembles and future ages fear our mighty fizzy water drinks, Steve? Go ahead and count the {tens of} thousands of industrial, commercial and consumer ways we deploy carbon dioxide, then compare-and-contrast how many tons sea magma vents spew more than All of Mankind, and does this about every decade, across deca-millennia: you see the Earth abides. What’s the market opportunities and ROI on reducing CO2 until plant life fails? Just wondering how to make sense of the goals IPPC states, maybe your fancy dire-maths can help? Meantime, there are plenty and real industrial pollutions choking ecosystems and toxifying our lives, but CO2 is silly distraction - at best.
Ahh, yes, just what I needed to take my mind off of the apocalyptic political landscape... A video about the apocalyptic environmental landscape 😅 Perfect LOL
Agree deny Delay and Distract yet the largest glacier over 800 SQ miles broke off and it's not being covered in mainstream media. Billionaires own the media companies that support their ideologies not the well-being of people.
The sponge atmosphere would not increase the extremes of drought and flood if we had lush vegetation cover. Then we'd have more constant but less intense precipitation. I don't think that's achievable given how fast the climate is changing, but worth trying maybe?
One thing I'm often missing in discussions about transitioning to green energy **when nuclear or even fusion** is included is this: "Real" green energy like wind, solar and in land hydro power more or less directly convert energy from the sun into electrical energy. Part of that electrical energy is then converted into radio waves which transports energy (and thus heat) away from earth (very little but still). -> They don't release any new energy on earth and even remove some. Nuclear power and eventually fusion power too on the other hand only release "new" energy on earth and heat it up even more. They are still "just" Thermal power station with an electrical conversion efficiency of just 30-40%. Their total efficiency can be a lot better if the waste heat is used for district heating but it's still just more heat "trapped" on earth.
i cannot imagine the amount of carcinogens that were released in those demolitions…however. that pales in comparison to the carcinogens released in the *lifetime* of those coal plants. the upshot is that there is an administration in power that is invested (i mean that in the most venal way you can imagine) in denying that anything is wrong, and will use whatever means they can latch onto, to get their way. including stopping funding for any “alarmist” programming, such as this. 07:33 seatbelt, Ms May?
communities and utilities that produce electricity will continue to choose renewables like wind, solar, and batteries because they are cheaper and profitable even DT can't stop capitalism
Thanks alot for Your work and this episode. But You got over the probably most interesting and important dispute currently in climate science by claiming "most scientists now agree..." at 17:40. I´m not a doomer and James Hansen is neither. I´d simply agree with You that we should not forget about the worst possible outcomes. I´d love to see You do a whole episode about the arguments of both sides of this dispute, kind of a James Hansen´s vs Michael Mann´s arguments episode.
Renewable transition is inevitable. All you have to do is to look up the price and efficiency curves of solar, the price of batteries and the deployment rate of wind. Game over. Nothing can compete with that in price per kW already, not to mention in 5 years when the economies of scale truly kick in. Until there is enough storage capacity some base line capacity will be provided by gas, nuclear, hydro. But in the long term even that is not necessary.
Hey while you're around OSU, you should go interview professor Andrew Millison! He's got a ton of inspiring information on the water infrastructure (and refilling aquifers) of dry climates around the world, and how villages are getting together to change their agriculture to sustainable, lush new methods (sometimes very old methods re-adopted with modern understanding) to fix their water insecurity, food insecurity and economic struggles. It's all documentable; you can reach out to the villages themselves and even go visit the sites to verify it. Really worth highlighting! This is a model for how future societies can fix the damage of the 1900's and early 2000's, becoming resilient and stable while boosting education and the wild ecosystem, simultaneously.
The one variable that really wasn't talked about was the problem of sea level rise. The Twaite glacier is going to give us a large rise in sea levels in the next decade.
@@albin4323 "Humans cannot control earth's thermostat, only narcissists thinks so." Uhhh, Scientists have known since the 1800s that more CO2 makes the Earth warmer, and since 1776, we have increased global CO2 levels by 52%, from 279 ppm to 423 ppm. Every time you burn just one gallon of gas in your car/truck, you add 20 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere, where much of it will stay for centuries. Thus every tankful adds 200-1000 pounds of CO2 to the Earth's systems. Now multiply that times all the vehicles and boilers etc. on Earth. Thousands of research studies prove that our emissions caused ~98% of all global warming since 1900. The evidence for that is so rock solid that every nation on Earth has signed off in agreement on that fact. IN fact, we are warming the planet 20 times faster than it usually warms when coming out of an ice age, and that is lethally-fast change for the ecosystems our lives depend on. Thousands of other research studies have documented hundreds of ways in which our emissions are hurting people and the planet. Please, read some science.
@ Refusing to understand what exactly? You can't force people to give up their lives because scientists has decided CO2 has a marginal effect on earth's temperature, all 7,999 billion people on this earth has a right to say no to that idea if that's the case.
@@albin4323 "You can't force people to give up their lives because scientists has decided CO2 has a marginal effect on earth's temperature," Uhh, maybe you didn't see my post before you replied, but this isn't just about it becoming a little warmer. The research shows that our emissions are slowly but steadily destroying the Earth's ability to support life, including humans life. We are increasing global CO2 levels TEN times faster than they increased before the worst mass extinction event in Earth's history.
If the place is abandoned there's usually illegal scrapping. Antique dealers will also go through old buildings and take doorknobs, wood trim, doors, sinks, etc. Wood workers might want the floorboards & joists if they're species/sizes that are hard to get today. Insects & rodents eat or nest in a lot of building materials. There's no incentive to stop this when the owner expects it to stay vacant. You might be surprised how fast an unused building becomes unusable even without a leaky roof.
1.5 ppm is scary enough on its own, especially considering the 30 yr delayed response our climate needs before it unleashes a new range of weather conditions.
@@paulc6766 "You may not need a grid as people go for energy independence." Extremely naive view. The average person is never going to be energy-independent to the point of not needing the grid at all.
Nuclear and hydro is still considered clean and are base load on demand, it is only the solar and wind that is completely unreliable subsidized by fossil fuel in peaker plants.
@@paulc6766 covering your roof with net zero solar does not make you independent, since US NE winters produce only 1/5 of the summer energy production. So personal energy independence is a complete fantasy. A net zero solar home also only shave about 1% off your carbon emissions, to understand why you need to know that US per Capita Energy Use is 300GJ per person see Wikipedia. That's the same amount as produced by 300 solar panels for primary production yet you have maybe 20 panels on a roof. If my roof had 15 panels we would be net zero, but that's only 1% of all our primary energy use.
Nate Hagens can show how climate change is a symptom of a bigger problem. New video: Energy Poverty, Depletion, and 'Green' Ambitions with Scott Tinker | TGS 161
The main reason coal power declined in the US was the lower price of natural gas because of hydraulic fracturing. And the reason solar, wind, and batteries will replace natural gas over time is that renewables are cheaper now, and the prices are continuing down year after year.
except that during the night solar is infinitely expensive since there is no sun at night and hardly any in the winter. So where does the grid get energy from to keep the grid up 24/265, it uses nat gas in base load and peaker plants to make solar and wind look workable. And batteries can not get much cheaper they are highly mineral dependent from sources that are depleting, and they don't even store much energy, barely good enough for hourly storage. With solar production being 5x better in the summer than in winter, where does the winter production then come from, wind is not reliable to fall back on.
@@johnjakson444 lol it's not infinitely expensive lots of people and businesses have 100% of energy met with solar plus batteries So it is possible for the grid as well, it just needs to be at scale Anyway that's off topic since you were only talking about hydrogen production. And solar power has a lot of oversupply even today. If you are talking about a theoretical way to produce hydrogen with natural gas, the only problem with that is that it adds CO2 to the atmosphere, so why do it at all? The only possible reason to use hydrogen as a storage instead of fossil fuels is to decarbonize. But you are not decarbonizing if you use natural gas.
@@johnjakson444 batteries are definitely getting cheaper every year and they are already 90% cheaper than 10 years ago Plus there are several, maybe a dozen different kinds of "batteries", each of which has pros and cons, but all of which are better than hydrogen today in terms of hydrogen. Hydrogen is important, but using it for storage of energy only makes sense if you are trying to decarbonize. So, first, you wouldn't use natural gas to decarbonize. Second, there are cheaper alternatives.
I love PBS Terra because they usually don’t pull back their punches, they keep it real even when the answer to the questions might be depressing or scary. But this seems to fly in the face of the reality of what is happening with the United States right now. I work in clean heat, they’re ending ALL programs that were helping homeowners convert from oil to heat pumps. They want everyone to stay on gas and oil. In New York, we cancelled every wind farm that was planned on being built off the coast, and our large solar farm project is on indefinite hold. It does NOT look good
i think it’d be interesting to look at how heat will effect crop failures. The midwest which was specifically “not at risk” will be destroyed by the record droughts that we will continue to see based on these models
@@kmoses582 Are you trying to be intentionally dense? This isn't about warm vs. cold, it's about hundreds of disruptive changes that are already hurting the web of life in hundreds of ways, including increasing crop failures and livestock deaths due to MORE extreme droughts and heatwaves, and the expanding range of crop-killing insects.
At the start of this video, she shows a chart showing coal and gas use climbing faster than clean energy. At the end of this video, she says, "coal is no longer king". Unfortunately, PBS does not want to scare people when they should. So they tend to be quite positive!
I am 57 and plan to retire at 65. I own my house and cars. My largest expense is my bill from my energy company. Two years ago they started charging more between 3pm and 7pm. This last month was my largest bill ever. This spring I am investing in solar panels, a controller and battery storage. By the time I retire I hope to be ditching my energy company.
good for you, also look up you total energy production, each panel of 250W nameplate will net you about 1GJ a year or more. Then note that in Wikipedia it gives your Per Capita Energy Use, in the US you will be noted as using 300GJ of energy every year, not in your house, but in your total worldly energy use, the energy in your car, house, those solar panels, the college or military or hospital you might have gone to, the food and agriculture sector and roads bridges planes and infrastructure etc. To double check on that look up LLNL Energy Flow Graph for 2023, note that it says the entire US used about 97Quads or in SI units 100XJ or 100 G GJ. Divide that by 330M and you get 300GJ per person. It would take 300 panels to make the same energy as used per person, hard to believe as it maybe.Your rooftop represents only about 1% of your true energy use.
I don't know if they were using heat indexes or what, but the data I came up with for "number of 100 degree days by county" in 2023 is slightly different than what they have, it's slightly more promising. Imperial County California, the warmest county in the US, had 124 days over 100 degrees in 2023, which is slightly lower than their 131 number. There were also many more states in my data that had near zero 100 degree days in 2023, including Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota. However, the three states in the Pacific Northwest had substantially more 100 degree days in my data than what their map says. So I'd be curious on where they got that map at 20:14 .
There is so much confusion and misinformation today. But Common sense should tell us all, we can't continue producing so much waste without severe consequences. Maybe start with If you dont truly need something, dont buy it, buy things with less packaging and made of reusable materials, We must all work together globally to solve major issues asap.
goody, forget about hospitals, universities, scientific progress, roads, transport, freezers, the easy western way of life. So Victorian era with 1 solar panel per person, how nice. Without The Hot Air by MacKay or the US rewrite by Bill Gates will give you a better understanding of how the energy world actually works. All the energy everyone uses in a modern life is about 100x the obvious energy when you look around your own home counting up the appliances you can see. Could try living in North Korea, that's a pretty low energy country per capita, but it's all based on coal.
I must be on auto comment delete, how much less energy do you think we could go to, we are currently on 10KW primary power level per person or 100 times human level. Going back to 1KW would not be such a nice life, and further to 100W extremely unpleasant.
Too late.What we need to do is prepare for weather change. It was predicted that the turing point was in the 1970s. Weather change warning started in the 1960s.
Mark my words; it is inevitable that fight is coming over how fast to phase out fossil fuels for burning, and it will be reduced to a battle between the biggest investors in banking and the biggest investors in fossil fuels; and politicians, environmental activists, and scientists will be irrelevant in this battle of the titans.
Once Fusion breaks through, everything is going to change. You all can speculate all you want, but we absolutely must replant most of our forestlands. Everywhere we can, we must reintroduce biomass to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere. This will help cool the planet faster as well as facilitate long term viability for the human species.
Fusion is a scientific farce. A single sheet of paper can describe the essentials of how a fission power plant works with temperatures that could reach 800c for say Molten Salt reactors or MSRs and the current generation is also well understood. For fusion, all you can write on a sheet of paper is how the Deuterium Tritium reaction works and state that Deuterium is abundant as water (well 1 part in 1000s) while Tritium simply does not exist and never will and it's only source is from Candu fission plants and it can not be bred. It also requires temperatures of 100M K, vs 1000K for fission. And it also requires multiple impossible technologies in close proximity, so 100M K plasma, a water cooled steel vessel being irradiated by neutron flux, cryogenic chilled superconducting magnets to drive the plasma confinement. A practical fusion plant in 100 years will require about 100x the resources of a fission power plant for theoretical power vs actual power output. The Trouble With Tritium by Daniel Jassby for the deeply interested. next up, Once Antimatter power plants break through, we can retire all the old fusion power plant as not being cool enough.
@@NotTheRealRustyShackleford Actually the world had fission 2B years ago in the natural Oklo reactor in Gabon, it likely ran for 100k years at a thermal power output of 100KWth IIRC. Life had not even started, but the U235 ratio was many times higher back then maybe 4% vs today at 0.7%.
@johnjakson444 I remember reading about the natural reactor in Africa a while back. I was mostly talking about modern nuclear power plants. I just hate seeing all this fusion hype when we could have been building fission reactors like crazy, and have an abundance of cheap green energy. You definitely sound more knowledgeable than me on nuclear energy. You work for DOE or at the national labs, lol?
@@NotTheRealRustyShackleford Thanks, no I am a semiconductor veteran, I should and did used to be lukewarm on solar because its silicon, but the math didn't add up. When I retired I had loads of free time to study whatever but especially astro physics and the nuclear processes that go on in the Big Bang and various types of stars. And that leads to studying the various nuclear weapons devices and of course the pie in the sky fusion and space travel nonsense. As for DOE the Oakridge labs story in Tenn where the Molten Salt Reactor was built in late 60s and cancelled by Nixon etc, so many interesting political science stories. That's what drew me in to MSRs, not so much the Thorium angle. It does seem as if we will get some interesting reactors now simply because of the cloud and AI requirements so we will see. Even Bill Gates is in good standing with nuclear now since his natrium reactor ticks a lot of boxes and is being built and it copies a lot of the best ideas of MSR being partially salt loop cooling based. IIRC His fuel is in pebbles in the liquid sodium and the salt is the secondary coolant loop. He copied the idea of using the secondary salt loop for daily buffering so 24GWhrs could produce electrical power on any load pattern the grid could throw at it as long as extra generators could draw down the heat from the tanks as needed. The heat still has to go through a steam loop but the sodium is a km away. The irony is that the cooling salt likely also uses sodium chloride table salt. Also you might enjoy a free PDF download book on energy by David MacKay a physicist that wrote Without The Hot Air text about 10 years ago, he also had to rediscover energy because he also found himself in lala land where he knew something was wrong but had no data, so he went and got all the world's data on energy. His UK book prompted Bill Gates to translate it for the US audience to make it more relevant to the US audience. MacKay did not know about any of the modern nuclear work but he did conclude that the UK needed to be 3 times bigger to have enough land to be all Renewable, but with all nuclear could just put new reactors right next to the old ones. There is Also LLNL Energy Flow Diagrams and Wikipedia Per Capita Energy Use where they have all the data on energy use production etc. cheers
What do we dowith all those coal fired power plants? High capacity grid scale battery storage needs to go somewhere and former coal plants have two advantages: (1) They are already contaminated. Once you deploy enough batteries you are guaranteed that there will be some sort of catastrophic failure that spills toxic battery chemicals. It’s just math. Odds are they won’t spill anything that hasn’t already contaminated these sites. (2) Electrical power lines, equipment and trained personnel. Power storage requires power line connections. Coal plants already have these. They will need high power load balancing equipment to match battery storage power supplied to the millisecond to millisecond demand constraints of the power grid. They already have most of this. They will need people to maintain the high voltage equipment. In most states these tradespeople are highly skilled, highly regulated and will need employment when the coal power plant shuts down; they are skilled employees who already live in the area. Either way coal plants are shutting down. What we do with these toxic legacies is important. We can insulate local communities from economic shock while transitioning them to a cleaner future power grid if we simply try. Besides: the sites are so polluted that no one else in their right mind would use them. If the prior owner can remain solvent when transitioning to storage from burning then it is possible that the government will not soak up as much of the cost of environmental clean up.
If the coal plants still have their Generating Halls with working steam plant turbines, then putting a nuclear reactor on site to dump nuclear heat into steam could work too, and has been suggested before, and one or two instances have been done IIRC.
Young people around the world are depressed, rightly so, due to climate change. The ramping up or renewables will lead to plentiful cheap energy. When energy is cheap the economy booms. I'd like you to interview economists, show them the predictions for renewable energy amount and price and see if our young people are heading into a long term boom.
When energy is cheap the economy booms. So true. When energy is unreliable it breaks the economy. Renewables are not base load, look at Germany, it replaced all of its base load nuclear with useless solar+wind +++ a shit load of the dirtiest coal, because the word Atom scares the bejusus out of greens and liberals. Net result Germany has 2 grids, the industrial grid for car building with brown coal, and the expensive broken grid for everyone else. And Germany and Denmark would force their unwanted solar wind excesses onto the Euro grid. Fortunately the EU grid is quite resilient up to a point thanks to French nuclear and Norwegian hydro.
From the comments on videos/articles like this one, it's clear. People just want to feel a certain way. I don't blame them, what can we really do. The damage is already baked in. It will just continue to get worse every single year.
It was always unstoppable. We either switch to renewables by choice or by force (and when I say force I mean forced back to a preindustrial society. Any system that isn’t sustainable will eventually stop.)
@ That’s why I never had much empathy for the drill-baby-drill people. Even if I was dumb enough to believe climate change was fake, I would still support the exact same policies because the modern lifestyle, of which I and billions of others have grown accustomed, is entirely dependent on resources that will be exhausted this century. To support Trump’s energy policy, one would need to make a moral argument about why modern society should be destroyed and why forcing us back to a preindustrial society is better.
Or read up on energy use to see why renewables are just green washing, clue is Energy Density. It takes 300 solar panels to make every year the "Per Capita Energy Use" of every US citizen, (plug that into Wikipedia). The US has enough l;and to cover itself with solar for 300 panels per person every 20 years, but the rest of the rich world does not and anyway even if land and solar PV is free, making it work will not work. Summer is 5x more productive than winter for solar. Also if you have the guts, "Without The Hot Air" by MacKay will explain how energy works, or the Bill Gates version for the American audience.
No, lets not do that, let's build a nuclear economy to the max, very little land needed for it and have an endless source of process heat and electricity 24/365. Oh do look up your Per Capita Energy Use on Wikipedia, the US is 300GJ a year per person. One solar panel in the US NE makes about 1GJ/yr with some battery included. Divide 300 by 1 for the number of panels per person. Replace every 20 some years. Or use wind power, same amount of land needed and replace every 15 years. And then there is the storage problem, but you are already lost in the depth of this problem. Search for a library book on energy like Without The Hot Air by David MacKay. or download the free PDF version or ask Bill Gates about his version of this book.
@@johnjakson444 "No, lets not do that, let's build a nuclear economy to the max" Maybe you haven't thought this true, but industrialized civilization is heading toward collapse because it is ecologically unsustainable, so here's the question. When lots of nations collapse and can no longer keep the power grid on, is it a good or bad idea to have hundreds or thousands of operating nuclear plants that would go into meltdown?
@@HealingLifeKwikly You don't know anything about nuclear power do you, they don't generally go into meltdown except through stupidity at Chernobyl and Fukushima have a defensive sea wall not built quite high enough. To be fair only a highly functioning economy is going to build any nuclear at all and if an economic collapse does come on, most large capital projects will be suspended. I am well aware of the climate change crisis, and I know perfectly well a good deal about energy use and production, nuclear physics etc. I have been dropping posts all over this thread. So take a country like the UK where I come from, if building solar and wind was the only allowed source of energy the landscape of the UK would only be big enough for 20M people, and it would be 2/3 covered with panels or turbines same general output per sq km. The French could actually do it they have 1/3 the population density. You probably have no idea what your energy use is do you, you might whip out an energy bill from the gas and electric company. Instead look at LLNL and get the Energy Flow Graph and check that for the US it does say 100XJ or 100,000M GJ, divide by 330M and you still get 300GJ per person. It also says the same on Wikipedia, Per Capita Energy Use, but you don't want to admit why that number is so high. Have you ever visited LLNL or Wikipedia energy pages or read a book on energy, I doubt it. If you want 300GJ year US lifestyle pick one of the following, 300 panels per person, x number of barrels of oil equiv, or nuclear. The nuclear is by far the lightest approach that has the least impact on the earth. Or live in Europe or modern Asia, it is then 200GJ a year per capita. If we go back to Victorian times we get closer to 20-50GJ but from biomass. Go back to Henry 8th and we can hit 10GJ from animal labor. Do you know that France has half the CO2 emissions of Germany per capita, it is because France is mostly nuclear in electricity while Germany is mostly coal solar and wind for electric. The remaining energy sectors in transport industry commerce and home are 2/3 primary heat/chemical based while the electric is 1/3. It says that right on the LLNL graph. And the MacKay book says exactly the same thing, pick your poison and see what it will cost you. if you don't like nuclear then pick fossil fuel or massive land use per person for REs or go back in time to a much lower level of energy use. cheers
@@HealingLifeKwikly hey I replied but comments get deleted, if economies go into rapid decline, then big cap projects are going to be suspended anyways, having enough energy 24/365 is what keeps economies afloat , and you have to choose between REs that swamp the landscape, of fossil fuels or nuclear or hardly any energy at all. Just so you know US energy use is still 300GJ/yr and as power that is close to 10KW of primary power, 24/365 or 100 times the bodies energy needs of 100W. The US alone would need about 1000 1GWe equiv reactors, the rest of the world another 4000 or so. I would go with MSRs or perhaps the natrium reactor.
If civilization collapses then who cares? Because if there would be such complete collapse then it means that humanity got wiped anyway and we are actually quite sturdy species so I doubt that anything bigger than squirrel would be alive in such scenario.
Either way it is too late. You can't stop a speeding train without dissipating the momentum. And besides, we'll not stop putting carbon into the atmosphere anyways.
Um the permafrost in Alaska is melting, there may not be much solid land in Alaska you could build anything on, but maybe on stilts just like in Florida.
@johnjakson444 My house has no stilts. I don't live on the water or right near the water. According to Pinellas County maps, I'm on one of the last islands as Pinellas is taken by the gulf and Tampa Bay. In other words, I'm pretty high up, elevation wise. I was born in Florida, lived in the Bahamas, and came back to Florida. I know what a hurricane is and what it can do. The FIRST thing I've always done when moving is know the elevation.
@@FrankJohnson-r3e elevation good, but you get my drift, anyone that lives at near sea level on the coast whether its Florida or all the way up here in Mass has to deal with stilts to get a permit to rebuild ocean storm damaged properties. I also look at the flood maps to stay away from that problem. But in permafrost Alaska the stilts needed to keep the ground from receiving too much heat from the structure above it, which they have long done in the old Soviet Siberia or even putting chilling HW on the oil pipeline stands.
will tell you what the primary energy inputs are for the US 2023, all the way back to the 1950s?, for different states and also almost all countries, you can see what the primary energy input are from. They also have stats on CO2 and water is too. The problem is that all energy inputs for electrical only represents about 1/3 of all energy use, and the rest has nearly 0% of renewable for transport, heat, commerce, industrial. So about 70% of all energy is 99% based on fossil fuel. Clean energy only really shines in the electrical 1/3 section.
They (the batteries) are themselves recyclable. The whole problem is the burning of anything. I doubt you are aware that the big mines are now using electric equipment and these trucks are huge and they operate without a driver as do the electric trains that take the ore to the coastal ports.
There is an Australian mineralogist who talks about the mineral crisis that awaits us, essentially all the mining we did in the past 100 years was the easy pickings, next gen of mining is dealing with ever more energy intensive mining, something like the ores are producing only tiny fractions of the metals we used to get 50 years ago. And the push for batteries and EVs is only pushing against a concrete wall of increasing rarity. And we also offshore much of the mining to China and Australia.
And feedback loops: permafrost melting releases CO2 and methane, which cause more warming, causing more permafrost melting, and then more CO2 and methane release, and so on... The area involved is huge: look at a globe, focus on northern Russia (esp. Siberia) and northern Canada. A huge area in which permafrost melt cannot be controlled in any meaningful way.
@@jondevaney6860 And we all forget about the clathrates in the ocean bottom ever more permafrost like situation the old biota rotting away could easily be released.
Are you guys planning a counterpoint-type video on the reasons why black energy (coal, CH4, oil) plants are still being built and invested in even though green energy (solar, wind) are currently cheaper and faster to build?
Why not look at Germany, they shut down some 20 odd nuclear power plants and replaced them with unreliable solar and wind and made it somewhat reliable by adding new gen coal plants that work at 45% eff vs the old 30% coal of the 1950s. These Siemens coal burners now act as peaker plants turning on in 20 min vs several hours for the old gen coal. And then compare the French and German per capita CO2 emissions, Germany wins there too, they have double the French emissions per capita because wll France mostly uses.......
Maybe PBS should do an educational video on how the grid actually works, in fact they used to do incredible videos on engineering before TH-cam took over
Hopefully we get to fusion soon, but in the meantime we have better renewable options and safer nuclear tech we could invest more in. Even battery tech is moving to safer and more abundant elements. But undoing this damage needs a moonshot effort and focus. And it starts by voting for leaders who care about the future, not lie about global warming. We are spending way more on disasters and will see things get worse for way more $$$ than going "green".
Simple men like Trump sometimes have a strength to appreciate nuclear, something in his tiny noggin likes nuclear but he does not know why, he has a sense of high energy density good. vs low energy density pointless. Meanwhile Biden also supported nuclear, but he could not get that word to pop out of his mouth fearing the wrath of the greens. And no, fusion is a complete sham of science, I could explain again but already did elsewhere. Search The Trouble With Tritium by Daniel Jassby.
Wonder why my comment below is hidden, well fusion power plants are in the realm of pixie dust, we do have fission though as you say and it only requires advanced materials working at temps of 1000K or less while fusion needs 100M K to even theoretically work, and it also requires water cooling a steel containment vessel that is being irradiated by those fast neutrons from the plasma leaving it as new radioactive waste and the magnets needs to be superconducting at liquid helium temps in the presence of neutron bombardment vessel and to keep the plasma from hitting the vessel and vaporising it. So many easy problems to solve. Come back in 1000 years and maybe it will be done. And there is the nagging problem of where will the tritium will come from, it exists only on earth because of the Candu reactors producing it in tiny amount. And breeding tritium is another mathematical fantasy, while uranium famously is chain reacting with a gain of 2.5 or so, lithium hit by neutrons will likely produce a replacement tritium at rates far below 1 when it needs to be well over 1. Flogging a dead horse here.
9:00 I mean I'm all in favor of dismantling coal plants, but is blowing them to kingdom come really a good idea? Think of all the soot, the concrete dust, the atomize officer furniture, asbestos, etc. that was probably in an old building like that that is now in the atmosphere slowly raining down on anybody and anything downwind. Seems crazy to me. Feels like when we have a huge unemployment rate there should be a civilian engineering corp that dismantles old buildings like this brick by brick so as to cause minimal environmental impact from the removal of old carbon-hogs like coal plants.
@@willjapheth23789aircraft carriers, maybe? This is rarely done for historic buildings to save them from things like sinkholes, but they're smaller than a coal plant.
Shut down the coal plants and watch Midwest summers get much hotter. Pre coal burning days, (around 1955), Cincinnati averaged 14 days per decade of 100F heat. In the last 12 summers we’ve totaled zero days of 100F heat even though the planet is much hotter now. There is a stunning lack of summer record heat in the eastern US. 99.9999% of people are oblivious to this obvious fact. Just look at the NWS records.
This is a prime example of why more people need to get more prepared and think about "Emergency Preparedness Management" for both your home and vehicles. I am a TH-camr under my Full-Name with the same profile picture as this post with 53 videos covering 30 different category topic subjects sharing my personal knowledge and experiences with others to help others improve their overall adult lives. I've got videos on building yourself a high quality 24-72 Hour Survival Bug Out Bags, Home and Vehicle Preparedness and Readiness advice videos, Several different Financial Literacy advice videos, a Personal Property Insurance Excel and Photos Tracker, Scammer Warning Signs advice, Basic Vehicle Maintenance Services and Purchasing advice, and more!
Renewables depend on fossil power to make them work until they reach some limit where it breaks, but Renewable fans don't know or care to know how the grid really works. It's like a giant AC battery when sunshine is free and so on
You produce a lot of CO2 mining/manufacturing the solar panels/wind turbines. They will produce CO2 savings over time but not during the implementation. Personally I don't believe CO2 is a significant factor. Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas. My understanding is that historically CO2 increases following temperature increases rather than causing it. Indeed I don't think there is a relationship between CO2 and temperature. To think the earth will stabilise is wrong - we already have had an exceptionally long period of stable temperature. Variation is really a normal. It'll be interesting what develops.
If you buy small consumer batteries meant for small appliances, they carry steep premiums because the manufacturers wanna exploit you. They are talking about buying them in bulk in a "raw" form , that has become much chraper.
Musk used to talk about the EV battery pack costing $400 per KWhr now heading towards the $100 today and that is huge. Try and buy cells to build your own experimental EV device and its still $400/KWhr. Besides batteries can never have the energy density of fuels and there is limited opportunity to make them much cheaper. And there is the resource limitation of the rare metals needed. Sodium Ion batteries could break that logjam though.
@johnjakson444 I regularly buy them for 200€/kwh, what are you talking about? Buy raw cells from bulk stores, they are cheaper...don't buy them from regular electronic chains...
@@TheEsseboy I was thinking of the typical fully packaged generator type systems with management and cooling, I assume Musk was doing the same when he talked about prices in his talks. I would expect the cells to be about 50% of the system cost.
@ They are not, they are majority of the cost, the management and conversion boards are cheap compared to batteries, again, when you are ordering thousands of them.
Maybe you haven't thought this true, but industrialized civilization is heading toward collapse because it is ecologically unsustainable, so here's the question. When lots of nations collapse and can no longer keep the power grid on, is it a good or bad idea to have hundreds or thousands of operating nuclear plants that would go into meltdown?
Hey Maya, I always enjoy this show, informative and well explained. Not knowing if these are fake or real and hope these are real, I have this remark with no malicious intentions on your behalf. If your so sensible to climate change and environment problems we cause, are your long finger nails are actually real? If not, what you speak does not match your behaviour !
If only the grid could be hardened as quickly as these coal plants could be shut down (or sooner!). Be mindful that solar panel technologies are made in China and the tariffs will be painful for the consumer.
The local coal stove factory just redesigned their coal stoves for 2025 and they're seeing record sales. My state also banned any new natural gas hookups, so the options are heat pumps, oil heat, or coal heat. Also, with the new tariffs, the price of natural gas and electricity is now sky high, so people are looking for cheaper alternatives. Roughly 50% of my local power comes from renewable sources and most of those come from Canada. And now canadian prices are up by 25%. Coal is now the cheapest source of heat for New England, followed by oil and biofuel. Portable diesel heaters are also extremely popular here. When heat pumps become portable, then we can have a clean energy transition. As it stands, oil, diesel and coal are still the choice heating fuels for Northern states.
Thanks for watching! Weathered: Earth's Extremes is everything you love about Weathered but bigger and better. Across 6 incredible episodes, Maiya and the Weathered crew travel around the world to tell the definitive story about our changing weather and climate, and how a better future is within reach.
This is only one of the episodes -- to support Maiya and the team (and help us make more of this show), you can watch the rest for free RIGHT NOW on the PBS App on your smart TV, phone, tablet or streaming device: to.pbs.org/PBSAppWeathered
And if you're outside of the US and want to watch the show, you can check it out on PBS.org here: www.pbs.org/show/weathered/
Maiya and the team worked so hard on this special show -- we can't wait for you to watch it!
-Team Terra
I have lived for thousands of years,
I will and have observed, witnessed, and been part of the whole of existence.
I will always love you.
I wish I could bring you with me.
😂 More like "Weathered: America's Extremes"! 😅 This video covered nothing about what's happening around the globe.
@@danveerseewoo2332
Live life as it is,
You will eventually come around.
"It is time to create some hope" - as fascism took over?
Re-Think this strategy., please. A german
@@meinkamph5327
We don't have a choice.
Most may not be aware, but we'll all be there with you.
Om
The U.S. isn't building any more coal fired power plants because they are uneconomic, but we are building more natural gas fueled Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plants. The good news, if any, is that they have greater thermal efficiency (50-60%) than coal fired plants. The bad news is that the natural gas infrastructure still has far too much leakage (over ~4% and it is worse than coal) to make natural gas a more climate friendly solution to the crisis.
Methane has a half-life of 9 years, so no, gas is absolutely better, but obviously needs to also end eventually.
Fossil fuel is not and will never be a “solution” to the climate crisis. It is the cause of the climate crisis. “Less bad” is not the same as “good”.
@@willjapheth23789Methane is hundreds of times more potent as a greenhouse gas prior to it breaking down in the atmosphere. And when it does break down, much if it reverts to CO2. How is that better?
@DirtFlyer 120 times about, but co2 is a long-term risk that won't go away. CH4 is much more carbon efficient than coal is, so we can see emission reductions just from switching to gas. In 70 years, today's CH4 will be meaningless compared to today's CO2. Both need to end eventually, but coal is worse.
@@willjapheth23789 if we hadnt already used our entire carbon budget. 25 years ago gas was probably a good transistional investment. We no longer have the headroom for new fossil fuel plants. Most new gas infrastructure is either doomed to be stranded assets or our climate is fucked.
I appreciate your optimism. I don't share it, but I certainly do appreciate it.
completely dodging the fact that the current president of the most powerful country in the world has the tagline 'drill, baby, drill'
@@Jvk1166z yes, but power dropping fast, baby.
In idaho 70% of our power is from renewables. And the power company plans to be completely coal free by 2030 and emission free by 2045. If idaho can do it any state can do it.
And what kind of energy was used to make the renewable energy machines?
@@TheRealSnakePlisken I'd imagine some amount of fossil fuel energy was used to prevent a larger amount of fossil fuel energy from being needed in the future.
"any state" gang this is ab the whole world lol
@@TheRealSnakePlisken In the future, renewable energy will make and run all renewable energy machines, including manufacturing and mining.
@@TheRealSnakePlisken This isn't the gotcha you think it is. "You used our current infrastructure to build a better, less polluting infrastructure! Therefore..." What? Hypocrisy? Is that the goal, accusing hypocrisy? All this reveals is that you and the industries you're toadying for can't or refuse to understand how basic reality works. Nobody is going to build clean energy starting from square one. Pretending that's a reasonable expectation and barking like a dog about infrastructure that isn't is ridiculous - the target of ridicule.
looking at that risk map toward the end makes the recent L.A. fires hit pretty hard. We ARE living out the extreme scenario.
The LA fires were caused primarily by Democrats and environmentalists ! ! !
- Not cutting underbrush and clearing the land of dead wood and not allowing regular burn cycles to clear out the dead vegetation!
j- Not allowing all the normal run off water from Northern Kalifornia to reach Southern Kalifornia not to mention the water is desperately needed by the farmers in the Central Valley!
@@LWRC Oh look, a clown
@@LWRC Stop with the lies about "environmentalists about Not cutting underbrush and clearing the land of dead wood". The SAME propaganda script was used for the Australia 2019-2020 fires. Here's the red flag, the propaganda kept calling it WILD Fires. That is the wrong term for Australia, it's BUSH Fires. Foreign trolls were spamming misinformation.
@@LWRC Stop with the LIES about "Not cutting underbrush and clearing the land of dead wood and not allowing regular burn cycles to clear out the dead vegetation". That was the same script used on the 2019-2020 Australia Fires. The massive Red Flag was the foreign trolls kept calling it WILD FIREs. The wrong term because the foreign trolls have no clue what they are talkimg about. FYI It's BUSH Fires.
@@LWRC Stop with the FALSEHOODs about - Not cutting underbrush and clearing the land of dead wood and not allowing regular burn cycles to clear out the dead vegetation. That was the same script used on the 2019-2020 Australia Fires. The massive Red Flag was the foreign trolls kept calling it WILD FIREs. The wrong term because the foreign trolls have no clue what they are talking about. FYI It's BUSH Fires. You are just another foreign troll.
In most areas renewable generation is cheaper than fossil fuels in the long term and are getting closer to the initial costs, and they are tending to last longer than initially expected so the long term costs are also dropping.
That a bunch of nonsense! The energy densiry of fossil fuels is far greater than any li-Ion battery or solar panel output efficiency at about 13%! And that doesn't even factor the costs of raw ore mining and fabrication costs of these two power sources!!!
@@LWRC What are you talking about? There is no fuel for solar panels. They get build and and then you have zero costs on fuel.
@@AzrethK9 The energies going into making the solar panel not to mention all the raw materials, especially rare earth elements, must be MINDED! Those energies are NOT FREE ! ! !
Solar panels barely last 10 years and then become toxic waste.
The manufacturing of solar panels generate tons of toxic waste that must be hauled away from the plant!
Not every location in the US can rely on solar panels for power generation!
So if you want to go down this green energy path, then stop using all the consumer products that you have today because they ALL came from fossil fuels ! ! !
@AzrethK9
The solar panels are made from energy! Not only production but the raw ore mining of the rare earth elements needed also require huge amounts of energy!
There is no free lunch in energy conversion ! ! !
Solar panels barely last 10 years and then they become toxic waste!
Not every location in the US nor around the world can use solar panels as a reliable source of energy production ! ! !
@@AzrethK9 A lot of fossil fuels get burnt to make the solar panel and there are no ways to replace them; the necessary process heat cannot be generated in any economically scalable way without coal. Lots of coal. Same for steel and cement.
This is a really well put together video! Love how you have a sort of cautious and grounded optimism that acknowledges the awful damage that climate change will cause while still lauding the progress we have made so far. We need a green new deal here in the states!
Americans don't lose hope. What the media and influencers won't tell you is that the rest of the world, even China, are moving forward. We actually ARE the exceptional country in this case.
China is projected to use less coal in 2026 than 2025. Like the USA, the Chinese economics for coal don’t make sense anymore compared to renewables.
That still doesn't refute the fact that energies for 'charging' these battery cars still come from fossil fuels ! ! ! Solar panels? How many days will you have to connect a car to get it fully charged from these panels alone? 3 weeks??!!! Remember, panels only put out enough barely to supply energy through inverters to power 120VAC and the chargers these battery cars require are high power chargers running at 480VAC with high current ! ! ! It will take weeks for a car connected up to only solar panels to charge from 1% to 100%!!!
You people supporting this have no clue what you are even talking about ! ! !
The United States is doing more than what the news says. Wisconsin has gotten rid of all but one coal powerplant now. They will all be shut down soon. There are also a ton of solar farms going up.
@@LWRC Your ignorance is astounding. A 10 KW solar system will produce about 60 KWh of energy over a day. Put half that into your EV and you will have half charged the EV in one day. This is more than enough for the average driver.
As the grid goes more and more towards renewables the charging for EVs will become cleaner and cleaner. Here in my state of South Australia, home to the world's first big battery built in 2017, over 70% of all electricity used by both domestic and industry now comes from wind and solar exclusively. The state government here has plans for this to become 100% by 2030.
Ever heard of a super cool energy type known as nuclear fission?
Yeah thats the solution,
I agree at least with xurrent tech efficiency, solar and wjnd cant sustain our needs alone thats why nuclear power is so important for us humans, fission till we figure out fusion
And complimenting it with solar and wind
While still easing the climate crisis by lowering coal and fossil fuel usage @LWRC
I used to drive a gasoline engine car that used 500 gallons a year which emitted (@20 lbs of CO2 per gallon) 10,000 lbs of CO2. And my San Francisco home HVAC heating used 400 therms of natural gas per year which produced (@12 lbs of CO2 per therm) 4800 lbs of CO2. This totaled ~15,000 lbs of CO2 emissions per year. Now, I drive an EV car, installed a heat pump for my house HVAC heating and changed to an all electric kitchen. All of these are now powered by my rooftop solar panels. So now my CO2 emissions or carbon footprint is essentially ZERO (except for a hot water heater which soon will be changed to a heat pump). CO2 greenhouse effects are causing extreme weather events such as hurricanes, heat waves and wildfires (ex. Florida, Las Vegas, Colorado and Los Angeles). I urge everyone to reduce their CO2 emissions. Note that switching to green appliances and solar power is expensive, but Biden’s energy tax credits and rebates have been helpful.
And what kind of energy was used to build those devices, and what kind of energy is used to rebuild or repair those items?
@@TheRealSnakePlisken
Exactly
@@TheRealSnakePlisken The amount of energy used to build and maintain those devices is many times less than the total lifetime emissions of continued use of a gas car and natural gas heating.
@@TheRealSnakePliskenInvestments have management fees that use cash. Using your line of thinking, everyone should put their money in Mason jars lol.
@@TheRealSnakePlisken This isn't the gotcha you think it is.
Thanks again Maiya for this installment. Btw 17:10 we've said we won't reach the upper estimates before, and we were wrong
It’s hard to wrap our heads around how technology disruption S-curves work, even while we’re now entering the steep part of the solar/battery adoption disruption curve. It’s hard to grok exponential behavior. Few people have ever heard of Wright’s Law, but Wright’s Law is now driving the world to renewable energy faster than even the most optimistic believed just a few years ago. Wright’s Law says that production costs of manufacturing decline with the volume being manufactured - each doubling of production causes a fixed percentage of cost reduction. Solar power has steadily dropped 20% in price with each doubling of production - and it has doubled every 2-3 years since the 1970s! In recent years, doubling cycles have been less than two years, each one dropping prices another 20%. So the cost of solar panels is dropping nearly 90% every decade now! Lithium batteries have seen a similar exponential price curve - they’re now 97% cheaper than they were in the early 1990s.
So a few years ago, solar panels became the cheapest source for raw electricity in the world. This contributes to explosive growth, keeping the pace of the doublings. Now, batteries are getting so cheap that it’s now cheaper to just buy batteries to keep the grid going overnight and some solar panels just to charge them, than it is to pay for fossil fuel to produce the same electricity for 20-30 years. Lots of people look at the state of the grid today and think “See, solar and batteries don’t really matter”, but they’re not thinking about the exponential rate of adoption, or the exponential drop in prices. It’s not about where we are now, it’s about where we’re going - what will the grid look like after 20 more years of this?
Explosive growth of industry is exactly what the problem is. This culture will destroy ecosystems just as fast with solar and lithium batteries. You are an idiot. Thanks for sharing.
That's a load of BS. When the sun don't shine and wind don't blow it's usually fossil power that keeps the grid working.
Germany already did your fantastic experiment replacing a butt load of nuclear with solar+wind + MASSIVE BROWN LIGNITE COAL plants because greens get upset with the ATOM.
See Wikipedia for Per Capita Energy Use by country to see the magnitude of the problem. US is 300GJ per capita, that's the same as 300 solar panels per person.
See also LLNL Energy Flow Graph to see how primary energy is sourced by country and US state. See also Without The Hot Air by physicist David MacKay
In the 1970s we didn't expect the changes to start until the 2040s. At 72, i can honestly say, we where really really wrong.
Because the growth of emissions was, unprecedented.
@@Dianasaurthemelonlord7777 I know. Explained that to my husband when i brought this up after the video.
_In the 1970s we didn't expect the changes to start _*_*until the 2300*_* WHO said "2040s" - at this time?
The speed up in the eighties were not foreseen - same with 2000. The JUMP in 2023 is still not understood.
The Limits to Growth published in the 70s predicted a time of transition noticeable before 2040. The "pollution" curve captures GHG emissions and their impact quite well.
@ Limits to growth - didn't covered climate change at all.
I remember they've foreseen a total collapse til 2070. Which fits with 2040 and a "transition noticeable"
so how do we stay optimistic now that we have an administration that no longer cares about climate change, renewable energy and even pulled us out of the Paris agreement AGAIN? Can we even survive the next 4 years of back sliding the progress that has been made, however little it was in the first place? I'm really asking for some hope I guess.
I think the world largely realizes this problem and is making improvements abroad. Unfortunately the US will just not be a leader on this. I wish US lawmakers would realize there is opportunity in this.
@@tomselek1000 me too.
The US is a bunch of states in a trench coat pretending to be a country. The President hardly determines climate outcomes. Organise locally.
The energy transition is too far along for Trump and his MAGA cult to stop. It will continue because it is the cheapest form of electric generation, and EVs are the cheapest cars to own long term, as well as the most fun to drive. It will continue because the rest of the world is not stupid. They want clean air and a livable planet.
Donald Trump is a very simple man as are most republicans, (not an insult), these people tend to support nuclear energy because something in their mind intuitively understands energy density, while the much more edumacated dems go for the shiny tech that is really low energy density and is silicon tech dense. The Per Capita Energy Use (see Wikipedia) of Americans is about 300GJ/yr, that could all be made with solar panels, each panel kicking in 1.1GJ a year.That comes to 300 panels per person. It does not include the cost of balancing day and night or winter summer or of rebuilding it all every 20 years or the tremendous new eWaste stream. Now Biden did support nuclear too, he just could not bring himself to utter the words in front of the edumacated supporters who only want to hear about solar and wind and batteries. And batteries at scale is a whole other toxic subject, on the minerals front.
You dont seem to notice that this administration is going the other way
Deny delay distraction, yet during the current CO2 concentrations the sealevel was 200 ft higher.in the past. Take all the time you need to let this sink in.
Ia am confident the budget will soon demand their attentions away from agit-prop as this tripe.
@@MyLoganTreksyawn.
Is there a chemist in the house? How did the greatest flourishing of life on this planet, the Cambrian, ‘suffer’ exuberant growth at 6,000+ppm? The CO2 rule of thumb I learned is for every 100ppm added there are diminishing returns - rapidly approaching zero. It’s logarithmic describing the upper limit of what CO2 can even reflect. Scary IPCC bed-time stories has people peeing their bed over the number 450ppm and Steve is glad to pick up what Bosses lay down.
Mankind is so very mighty the earth trembles and future ages fear our mighty fizzy water drinks, Steve? Go ahead and count the {tens of} thousands of industrial, commercial and consumer ways we deploy carbon dioxide, then compare-and-contrast how many tons sea magma vents spew more than All of Mankind, and does this about every decade, across deca-millennia: you see the Earth abides.
What’s the market opportunities and ROI on reducing CO2 until plant life fails? Just wondering how to make sense of the goals IPPC states, maybe your fancy dire-maths can help? Meantime, there are plenty and real industrial pollutions choking ecosystems and toxifying our lives, but CO2 is silly distraction - at best.
@@MyLoganTreks because _shocker_ there were different conditions
You should sink in these balls
GLOBAL Warming is bigger than the US. Rest of the world will leave us behind as we hide under a rock with our torches, and afraid of shadows.
Ahh, yes, just what I needed to take my mind off of the apocalyptic political landscape... A video about the apocalyptic environmental landscape 😅 Perfect LOL
The video is literally about how a lot of hopeful changes are already well underway
Agree deny Delay and Distract yet the largest glacier over 800 SQ miles broke off and it's not being covered in mainstream media. Billionaires own the media companies that support their ideologies not the well-being of people.
@@wallycola5653Yeah, the problem is that the damage is already done. Welcome to the Human Era, my friend.
The political landscape is full of hope and relief. Common sense is winning against extremism.
@@Ilamarea where????
The sponge atmosphere would not increase the extremes of drought and flood if we had lush vegetation cover. Then we'd have more constant but less intense precipitation. I don't think that's achievable given how fast the climate is changing, but worth trying maybe?
I enjoy that Ecola State Park background. Thanks for keeping us backgrounded on climate issues.
Maiya I really respect your work. Thank you for helping us understand the causes behind doom we are heading towards.
This channel deserves way more subscribers.
One thing I'm often missing in discussions about transitioning to green energy **when nuclear or even fusion** is included is this:
"Real" green energy like wind, solar and in land hydro power more or less directly convert energy from the sun into electrical energy. Part of that electrical energy is then converted into radio waves which transports energy (and thus heat) away from earth (very little but still).
-> They don't release any new energy on earth and even remove some.
Nuclear power and eventually fusion power too on the other hand only release "new" energy on earth and heat it up even more. They are still "just" Thermal power station with an electrical conversion efficiency of just 30-40%.
Their total efficiency can be a lot better if the waste heat is used for district heating but it's still just more heat "trapped" on earth.
Good report 👍
Just remember that the Southern States just had Snow and Cold on some Record Fronts, not that long ago.
One of the most interesting, well rounded, and informative videos I've seen made on this subject. Well done guys!
i cannot imagine the amount of carcinogens that were released
in those demolitions…however.
that pales in comparison to the carcinogens released in the *lifetime* of those coal plants.
the upshot is that there is an administration in power that is invested
(i mean that in the most venal way you can imagine) in denying that
anything is wrong, and will use whatever means they can latch onto,
to get their way.
including stopping funding for any “alarmist” programming,
such as this.
07:33 seatbelt, Ms May?
communities and utilities that produce electricity will continue to choose renewables like wind, solar, and batteries because they are cheaper and profitable
even DT can't stop capitalism
Thanks alot for Your work and this episode. But You got over the probably most interesting and important dispute currently in climate science by claiming "most scientists now agree..." at 17:40.
I´m not a doomer and James Hansen is neither. I´d simply agree with You that we should not forget about the worst possible outcomes. I´d love to see You do a whole episode about the arguments of both sides of this dispute, kind of a James Hansen´s vs Michael Mann´s arguments episode.
8:37
"The best part is when the buildings fall down."
-Homer Simpson, circa 199x-
Renewable transition is inevitable. All you have to do is to look up the price and efficiency curves of solar, the price of batteries and the deployment rate of wind. Game over. Nothing can compete with that in price per kW already, not to mention in 5 years when the economies of scale truly kick in. Until there is enough storage capacity some base line capacity will be provided by gas, nuclear, hydro. But in the long term even that is not necessary.
absolutely right
and those lower prices are continuing to decline year after year after year
Hey while you're around OSU, you should go interview professor Andrew Millison! He's got a ton of inspiring information on the water infrastructure (and refilling aquifers) of dry climates around the world, and how villages are getting together to change their agriculture to sustainable, lush new methods (sometimes very old methods re-adopted with modern understanding) to fix their water insecurity, food insecurity and economic struggles. It's all documentable; you can reach out to the villages themselves and even go visit the sites to verify it. Really worth highlighting! This is a model for how future societies can fix the damage of the 1900's and early 2000's, becoming resilient and stable while boosting education and the wild ecosystem, simultaneously.
Very informative episode, thank you!
The one variable that really wasn't talked about was the problem of sea level rise. The Twaite glacier is going to give us a large rise in sea levels in the next decade.
Alarmist predictions are always correct, even when you are wrong
"...if we allow warming to reach 4 degrees." Good words. We are doing this to ourselves.
Humans cannot control earth's thermostat, only narcissists thinks so.
@@albin4323 Refuse to understand so just insult people who do. You're real chummy, pal.
@@albin4323 "Humans cannot control earth's thermostat, only narcissists thinks so." Uhhh, Scientists have known since the 1800s that more CO2 makes the Earth warmer, and since 1776, we have increased global CO2 levels by 52%, from 279 ppm to 423 ppm. Every time you burn just one gallon of gas in your car/truck, you add 20 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere, where much of it will stay for centuries. Thus every tankful adds 200-1000 pounds of CO2 to the Earth's systems. Now multiply that times all the vehicles and boilers etc. on Earth.
Thousands of research studies prove that our emissions caused ~98% of all global warming since 1900. The evidence for that is so rock solid that every nation on Earth has signed off in agreement on that fact. IN fact, we are warming the planet 20 times faster than it usually warms when coming out of an ice age, and that is lethally-fast change for the ecosystems our lives depend on. Thousands of other research studies have documented hundreds of ways in which our emissions are hurting people and the planet.
Please, read some science.
@ Refusing to understand what exactly? You can't force people to give up their lives because scientists has decided CO2 has a marginal effect on earth's temperature, all 7,999 billion people on this earth has a right to say no to that idea if that's the case.
@@albin4323 "You can't force people to give up their lives because scientists has decided CO2 has a marginal effect on earth's temperature," Uhh, maybe you didn't see my post before you replied, but this isn't just about it becoming a little warmer. The research shows that our emissions are slowly but steadily destroying the Earth's ability to support life, including humans life. We are increasing global CO2 levels TEN times faster than they increased before the worst mass extinction event in Earth's history.
07:47 use the seatbealt woman!
begining background music is dope fr
9:51 is there a reason that the buildings are not reused rather than being demolished? Are they gutted for useful materials?
Well if you blow it up it can’t be reopen if political winds shift
If the place is abandoned there's usually illegal scrapping. Antique dealers will also go through old buildings and take doorknobs, wood trim, doors, sinks, etc. Wood workers might want the floorboards & joists if they're species/sizes that are hard to get today. Insects & rodents eat or nest in a lot of building materials. There's no incentive to stop this when the owner expects it to stay vacant.
You might be surprised how fast an unused building becomes unusable even without a leaky roof.
Probably the building is also very unhealthy from all the coal dust
1.5 ppm is scary enough on its own, especially considering the 30 yr delayed response our climate needs before it unleashes a new range of weather conditions.
Clean energy means nothing with our elderly, failing grid system.
You may not need a grid as people go for energy independence.
@@paulc6766 "You may not need a grid as people go for energy independence."
Extremely naive view. The average person is never going to be energy-independent to the point of not needing the grid at all.
Fortunately the Biden infrastructure bill has $20 billion for grid upgrades. Hopefully we do more.
Nuclear and hydro is still considered clean and are base load on demand, it is only the solar and wind that is completely unreliable subsidized by fossil fuel in peaker plants.
@@paulc6766 covering your roof with net zero solar does not make you independent, since US NE winters produce only 1/5 of the summer energy production.
So personal energy independence is a complete fantasy. A net zero solar home also only shave about 1% off your carbon emissions, to understand why you need to know that US per Capita Energy Use is 300GJ per person see Wikipedia. That's the same amount as produced by 300 solar panels for primary production yet you have maybe 20 panels on a roof. If my roof had 15 panels we would be net zero, but that's only 1% of all our primary energy use.
Nate Hagens can show how climate change is a symptom of a bigger problem. New video:
Energy Poverty, Depletion, and 'Green' Ambitions with Scott Tinker | TGS 161
love your work!!!
The main reason coal power declined in the US was the lower price of natural gas because of hydraulic fracturing. And the reason solar, wind, and batteries will replace natural gas over time is that renewables are cheaper now, and the prices are continuing down year after year.
except that during the night solar is infinitely expensive since there is no sun at night and hardly any in the winter. So where does the grid get energy from to keep the grid up 24/265, it uses nat gas in base load and peaker plants to make solar and wind look workable. And batteries can not get much cheaper they are highly mineral dependent from sources that are depleting, and they don't even store much energy, barely good enough for hourly storage. With solar production being 5x better in the summer than in winter, where does the winter production then come from, wind is not reliable to fall back on.
@@johnjakson444 lol it's not infinitely expensive
lots of people and businesses have 100% of energy met with solar plus batteries
So it is possible for the grid as well, it just needs to be at scale
Anyway that's off topic since you were only talking about hydrogen production. And solar power has a lot of oversupply even today.
If you are talking about a theoretical way to produce hydrogen with natural gas, the only problem with that is that it adds CO2 to the atmosphere, so why do it at all?
The only possible reason to use hydrogen as a storage instead of fossil fuels is to decarbonize. But you are not decarbonizing if you use natural gas.
@@johnjakson444 batteries are definitely getting cheaper every year and they are already 90% cheaper than 10 years ago
Plus there are several, maybe a dozen different kinds of "batteries", each of which has pros and cons, but all of which are better than hydrogen today in terms of hydrogen.
Hydrogen is important, but using it for storage of energy only makes sense if you are trying to decarbonize.
So, first, you wouldn't use natural gas to decarbonize.
Second, there are cheaper alternatives.
I love PBS Terra because they usually don’t pull back their punches, they keep it real even when the answer to the questions might be depressing or scary. But this seems to fly in the face of the reality of what is happening with the United States right now. I work in clean heat, they’re ending ALL programs that were helping homeowners convert from oil to heat pumps. They want everyone to stay on gas and oil.
In New York, we cancelled every wind farm that was planned on being built off the coast, and our large solar farm project is on indefinite hold.
It does NOT look good
i think it’d be interesting to look at how heat will effect crop failures. The midwest which was specifically “not at risk” will be destroyed by the record droughts that we will continue to see based on these models
Crops love cold, that is why Alaska is a agriculture powerhouse and Florida, California, and Arizona have no farms.
@@kmoses582 Are you trying to be intentionally dense? This isn't about warm vs. cold, it's about hundreds of disruptive changes that are already hurting the web of life in hundreds of ways, including increasing crop failures and livestock deaths due to MORE extreme droughts and heatwaves, and the expanding range of crop-killing insects.
@@HealingLifeKwikly The obesity epidemic is due to lack of food, I am a smart climate alarmist.
I look forward to the future videos you make about the recent snowpocalypse in the deep south.
Great video! Intellectually rigorous, relevant, current, etc.
At the start of this video, she shows a chart showing coal and gas use climbing faster than clean energy. At the end of this video, she says, "coal is no longer king". Unfortunately, PBS does not want to scare people when they should. So they tend to be quite positive!
Thank you, well done.
Love that broken phone screen :-D
I am 57 and plan to retire at 65. I own my house and cars. My largest expense is my bill from my energy company. Two years ago they started charging more between 3pm and 7pm. This last month was my largest bill ever. This spring I am investing in solar panels, a controller and battery storage. By the time I retire I hope to be ditching my energy company.
good for you, also look up you total energy production, each panel of 250W nameplate will net you about 1GJ a year or more.
Then note that in Wikipedia it gives your Per Capita Energy Use, in the US you will be noted as using 300GJ of energy every year, not in your house, but in your total worldly energy use, the energy in your car, house, those solar panels, the college or military or hospital you might have gone to, the food and agriculture sector and roads bridges planes and infrastructure etc. To double check on that look up LLNL Energy Flow Graph for 2023, note that it says the entire US used about 97Quads or in SI units 100XJ or 100 G GJ. Divide that by 330M and you get 300GJ per person. It would take 300 panels to make the same energy as used per person, hard to believe as it maybe.Your rooftop represents only about 1% of your true energy use.
I don't know if they were using heat indexes or what, but the data I came up with for "number of 100 degree days by county" in 2023 is slightly different than what they have, it's slightly more promising. Imperial County California, the warmest county in the US, had 124 days over 100 degrees in 2023, which is slightly lower than their 131 number. There were also many more states in my data that had near zero 100 degree days in 2023, including Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota. However, the three states in the Pacific Northwest had substantially more 100 degree days in my data than what their map says. So I'd be curious on where they got that map at 20:14 .
There is so much confusion and misinformation today. But Common sense should tell us all, we can't continue producing so much waste without severe consequences. Maybe start with If you dont truly need something, dont buy it, buy things with less packaging and made of reusable materials, We must all work together globally to solve major issues asap.
The fastest way to make things better is to do less of what makes things worse. Use less energy. Then transition what's left to green.
goody, forget about hospitals, universities, scientific progress, roads, transport, freezers, the easy western way of life. So Victorian era with 1 solar panel per person, how nice.
Without The Hot Air by MacKay or the US rewrite by Bill Gates will give you a better understanding of how the energy world actually works.
All the energy everyone uses in a modern life is about 100x the obvious energy when you look around your own home counting up the appliances you can see.
Could try living in North Korea, that's a pretty low energy country per capita, but it's all based on coal.
I must be on auto comment delete, how much less energy do you think we could go to, we are currently on 10KW primary power level per person or 100 times human level. Going back to 1KW would not be such a nice life, and further to 100W extremely unpleasant.
Too late.What we need to do is prepare for weather change. It was predicted that the turing point was in the 1970s. Weather change warning started in the 1960s.
Shout out to Morro Bay! I was just there last weekend.
Very imformative, thanks for great work done to explain all aspects of climate change ❤
Mark my words; it is inevitable that fight is coming over how fast to phase out fossil fuels for burning, and it will be reduced to a battle between the biggest investors in banking and the biggest investors in fossil fuels; and politicians, environmental activists, and scientists will be irrelevant in this battle of the titans.
Once Fusion breaks through, everything is going to change. You all can speculate all you want, but we absolutely must replant most of our forestlands. Everywhere we can, we must reintroduce biomass to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere. This will help cool the planet faster as well as facilitate long term viability for the human species.
Why wait for fusion when we've had fission for decades?
Fusion is a scientific farce. A single sheet of paper can describe the essentials of how a fission power plant works with temperatures that could reach 800c for say Molten Salt reactors or MSRs and the current generation is also well understood.
For fusion, all you can write on a sheet of paper is how the Deuterium Tritium reaction works and state that Deuterium is abundant as water (well 1 part in 1000s) while Tritium simply does not exist and never will and it's only source is from Candu fission plants and it can not be bred. It also requires temperatures of 100M K, vs 1000K for fission. And it also requires multiple impossible technologies in close proximity, so 100M K plasma, a water cooled steel vessel being irradiated by neutron flux, cryogenic chilled superconducting magnets to drive the plasma confinement. A practical fusion plant in 100 years will require about 100x the resources of a fission power plant for theoretical power vs actual power output.
The Trouble With Tritium by Daniel Jassby for the deeply interested.
next up, Once Antimatter power plants break through, we can retire all the old fusion power plant as not being cool enough.
@@NotTheRealRustyShackleford Actually the world had fission 2B years ago in the natural Oklo reactor in Gabon, it likely ran for 100k years at a thermal power output of 100KWth IIRC. Life had not even started, but the U235 ratio was many times higher back then maybe 4% vs today at 0.7%.
@johnjakson444 I remember reading about the natural reactor in Africa a while back. I was mostly talking about modern nuclear power plants. I just hate seeing all this fusion hype when we could have been building fission reactors like crazy, and have an abundance of cheap green energy. You definitely sound more knowledgeable than me on nuclear energy. You work for DOE or at the national labs, lol?
@@NotTheRealRustyShackleford Thanks, no I am a semiconductor veteran, I should and did used to be lukewarm on solar because its silicon, but the math didn't add up. When I retired I had loads of free time to study whatever but especially astro physics and the nuclear processes that go on in the Big Bang and various types of stars. And that leads to studying the various nuclear weapons devices and of course the pie in the sky fusion and space travel nonsense.
As for DOE the Oakridge labs story in Tenn where the Molten Salt Reactor was built in late 60s and cancelled by Nixon etc, so many interesting political science stories. That's what drew me in to MSRs, not so much the Thorium angle. It does seem as if we will get some interesting reactors now simply because of the cloud and AI requirements so we will see. Even Bill Gates is in good standing with nuclear now since his natrium reactor ticks a lot of boxes and is being built and it copies a lot of the best ideas of MSR being partially salt loop cooling based. IIRC His fuel is in pebbles in the liquid sodium and the salt is the secondary coolant loop. He copied the idea of using the secondary salt loop for daily buffering so 24GWhrs could produce electrical power on any load pattern the grid could throw at it as long as extra generators could draw down the heat from the tanks as needed. The heat still has to go through a steam loop but the sodium is a km away. The irony is that the cooling salt likely also uses sodium chloride table salt.
Also you might enjoy a free PDF download book on energy by David MacKay a physicist that wrote Without The Hot Air text about 10 years ago, he also had to rediscover energy because he also found himself in lala land where he knew something was wrong but had no data, so he went and got all the world's data on energy. His UK book prompted Bill Gates to translate it for the US audience to make it more relevant to the US audience.
MacKay did not know about any of the modern nuclear work but he did conclude that the UK needed to be 3 times bigger to have enough land to be all Renewable, but with all nuclear could just put new reactors right next to the old ones. There is Also LLNL Energy Flow Diagrams and Wikipedia Per Capita Energy Use where they have all the data on energy use production etc. cheers
We're past 1.5 already folks
I feel like I have seen elements of this segment previously. Am I wrong?
What do we dowith all those coal fired power plants?
High capacity grid scale battery storage needs to go somewhere and former coal plants have two advantages:
(1) They are already contaminated. Once you deploy enough batteries you are guaranteed that there will be some sort of catastrophic failure that spills toxic battery chemicals. It’s just math. Odds are they won’t spill anything that hasn’t already contaminated these sites.
(2) Electrical power lines, equipment and trained personnel. Power storage requires power line connections. Coal plants already have these. They will need high power load balancing equipment to match battery storage power supplied to the millisecond to millisecond demand constraints of the power grid. They already have most of this. They will need people to maintain the high voltage equipment. In most states these tradespeople are highly skilled, highly regulated and will need employment when the coal power plant shuts down; they are skilled employees who already live in the area.
Either way coal plants are shutting down. What we do with these toxic legacies is important. We can insulate local communities from economic shock while transitioning them to a cleaner future power grid if we simply try.
Besides: the sites are so polluted that no one else in their right mind would use them. If the prior owner can remain solvent when transitioning to storage from burning then it is possible that the government will not soak up as much of the cost of environmental clean up.
That's great thinking outside the box.. perfect site to place battery storage.
If the coal plants still have their Generating Halls with working steam plant turbines, then putting a nuclear reactor on site to dump nuclear heat into steam could work too, and has been suggested before, and one or two instances have been done IIRC.
Young people around the world are depressed, rightly so, due to climate change.
The ramping up or renewables will lead to plentiful cheap energy.
When energy is cheap the economy booms.
I'd like you to interview economists, show them the predictions for renewable energy amount and price and see if our young people are heading into a long term boom.
When energy is cheap the economy booms. So true. When energy is unreliable it breaks the economy.
Renewables are not base load, look at Germany, it replaced all of its base load nuclear with useless solar+wind +++ a shit load of the dirtiest coal, because the word Atom scares the bejusus out of greens and liberals. Net result Germany has 2 grids, the industrial grid for car building with brown coal, and the expensive broken grid for everyone else. And Germany and Denmark would force their unwanted solar wind excesses onto the Euro grid. Fortunately the EU grid is quite resilient up to a point thanks to French nuclear and Norwegian hydro.
Shareholder value or lower prices 🤔
Great video y'all! Solid reporting.
Awe❤ I didn't realize the birthday gift😊 Thank you!
From the comments on videos/articles like this one, it's clear. People just want to feel a certain way. I don't blame them, what can we really do. The damage is already baked in. It will just continue to get worse every single year.
It was always unstoppable. We either switch to renewables by choice or by force (and when I say force I mean forced back to a preindustrial society. Any system that isn’t sustainable will eventually stop.)
Yep that what faces us.
@ That’s why I never had much empathy for the drill-baby-drill people. Even if I was dumb enough to believe climate change was fake, I would still support the exact same policies because the modern lifestyle, of which I and billions of others have grown accustomed, is entirely dependent on resources that will be exhausted this century. To support Trump’s energy policy, one would need to make a moral argument about why modern society should be destroyed and why forcing us back to a preindustrial society is better.
Or read up on energy use to see why renewables are just green washing, clue is Energy Density. It takes 300 solar panels to make every year the "Per Capita Energy Use" of every US citizen, (plug that into Wikipedia). The US has enough l;and to cover itself with solar for 300 panels per person every 20 years, but the rest of the rich world does not and anyway even if land and solar PV is free, making it work will not work. Summer is 5x more productive than winter for solar. Also if you have the guts, "Without The Hot Air" by MacKay will explain how energy works, or the Bill Gates version for the American audience.
Trump said drill baby drill. We're in for a VERY hot century.
You're pronouncing Antarctica wrong
I'll be happy when we are back on the decline of warming instead of going up.
Let's rapidly build our renewably powered global economy together 🌎.
No, lets not do that, let's build a nuclear economy to the max, very little land needed for it and have an endless source of process heat and electricity 24/365.
Oh do look up your Per Capita Energy Use on Wikipedia, the US is 300GJ a year per person. One solar panel in the US NE makes about 1GJ/yr with some battery included. Divide 300 by 1 for the number of panels per person. Replace every 20 some years. Or use wind power, same amount of land needed and replace every 15 years. And then there is the storage problem, but you are already lost in the depth of this problem. Search for a library book on energy like Without The Hot Air by David MacKay. or download the free PDF version or ask Bill Gates about his version of this book.
@@johnjakson444 "No, lets not do that, let's build a nuclear economy to the max" Maybe you haven't thought this true, but industrialized civilization is heading toward collapse because it is ecologically unsustainable, so here's the question. When lots of nations collapse and can no longer keep the power grid on, is it a good or bad idea to have hundreds or thousands of operating nuclear plants that would go into meltdown?
@@HealingLifeKwikly You don't know anything about nuclear power do you, they don't generally go into meltdown except through stupidity at Chernobyl and Fukushima have a defensive sea wall not built quite high enough.
To be fair only a highly functioning economy is going to build any nuclear at all and if an economic collapse does come on, most large capital projects will be suspended. I am well aware of the climate change crisis, and I know perfectly well a good deal about energy use and production, nuclear physics etc. I have been dropping posts all over this thread.
So take a country like the UK where I come from, if building solar and wind was the only allowed source of energy the landscape of the UK would only be big enough for 20M people, and it would be 2/3 covered with panels or turbines same general output per sq km. The French could actually do it they have 1/3 the population density.
You probably have no idea what your energy use is do you, you might whip out an energy bill from the gas and electric company. Instead look at LLNL and get the Energy Flow Graph and check that for the US it does say 100XJ or 100,000M GJ, divide by 330M and you still get 300GJ per person. It also says the same on Wikipedia, Per Capita Energy Use, but you don't want to admit why that number is so high. Have you ever visited LLNL or Wikipedia energy pages or read a book on energy, I doubt it.
If you want 300GJ year US lifestyle pick one of the following, 300 panels per person, x number of barrels of oil equiv, or nuclear. The nuclear is by far the lightest approach that has the least impact on the earth. Or live in Europe or modern Asia, it is then 200GJ a year per capita. If we go back to Victorian times we get closer to 20-50GJ but from biomass. Go back to Henry 8th and we can hit 10GJ from animal labor.
Do you know that France has half the CO2 emissions of Germany per capita, it is because France is mostly nuclear in electricity while Germany is mostly coal solar and wind for electric. The remaining energy sectors in transport industry commerce and home are 2/3 primary heat/chemical based while the electric is 1/3. It says that right on the LLNL graph. And the MacKay book says exactly the same thing, pick your poison and see what it will cost you. if you don't like nuclear then pick fossil fuel or massive land use per person for REs or go back in time to a much lower level of energy use. cheers
@@HealingLifeKwikly hey I replied but comments get deleted, if economies go into rapid decline, then big cap projects are going to be suspended anyways, having enough energy 24/365 is what keeps economies afloat , and you have to choose between REs that swamp the landscape, of fossil fuels or nuclear or hardly any energy at all.
Just so you know US energy use is still 300GJ/yr and as power that is close to 10KW of primary power, 24/365 or 100 times the bodies energy needs of 100W.
The US alone would need about 1000 1GWe equiv reactors, the rest of the world another 4000 or so. I would go with MSRs or perhaps the natrium reactor.
If civilization collapses then who cares? Because if there would be such complete collapse then it means that humanity got wiped anyway and we are actually quite sturdy species so I doubt that anything bigger than squirrel would be alive in such scenario.
Y'all came to my city to watch my power plant blow up and couldn't even say hi? Sad. ( did Y'all enjoy the stay? )
Either way it is too late. You can't stop a speeding train without dissipating the momentum. And besides, we'll not stop putting carbon into the atmosphere anyways.
Good video
I told my kids to buy land in Alaska now, while its still cheap. A lot of Florida is going to be under water. Dont buy Florida!
Um the permafrost in Alaska is melting, there may not be much solid land in Alaska you could build anything on, but maybe on stilts just like in Florida.
@johnjakson444 My house has no stilts. I don't live on the water or right near the water. According to Pinellas County maps, I'm on one of the last islands as Pinellas is taken by the gulf and Tampa Bay. In other words, I'm pretty high up, elevation wise. I was born in Florida, lived in the Bahamas, and came back to Florida. I know what a hurricane is and what it can do. The FIRST thing I've always done when moving is know the elevation.
@@FrankJohnson-r3e elevation good, but you get my drift, anyone that lives at near sea level on the coast whether its Florida or all the way up here in Mass has to deal with stilts to get a permit to rebuild ocean storm damaged properties. I also look at the flood maps to stay away from that problem.
But in permafrost Alaska the stilts needed to keep the ground from receiving too much heat from the structure above it, which they have long done in the old Soviet Siberia or even putting chilling HW on the oil pipeline stands.
Massless energy logistics are far more profitable than the logistics and complexities of moving large quantities of mass.
Imagine all the asbestos that got released into the air.
When taxes internalize externalities, then business decisions change…coal is the perfect example
USA: Hold my beer.
will tell you what the primary energy inputs are for the US 2023, all the way back to the 1950s?, for different states and also almost all countries, you can see what the primary energy input are from. They also have stats on CO2 and water is too. The problem is that all energy inputs for electrical only represents about 1/3 of all energy use, and the rest has nearly 0% of renewable for transport, heat, commerce, industrial. So about 70% of all energy is 99% based on fossil fuel. Clean energy only really shines in the electrical 1/3 section.
The first can be changed the second is much more complicated
No discussion of the emissions produced in the production of batteries...
They (the batteries) are themselves recyclable. The whole problem is the burning of anything. I doubt you are aware that the big mines are now using electric equipment and these trucks are huge and they operate without a driver as do the electric trains that take the ore to the coastal ports.
There is an Australian mineralogist who talks about the mineral crisis that awaits us, essentially all the mining we did in the past 100 years was the easy pickings, next gen of mining is dealing with ever more energy intensive mining, something like the ores are producing only tiny fractions of the metals we used to get 50 years ago. And the push for batteries and EVs is only pushing against a concrete wall of increasing rarity. And we also offshore much of the mining to China and Australia.
Whatever we do next it is an ardent attempt at success in the vast face of hopelessness after climate hygiene shift. Commish
You're not taking methane into account. Net Zero won't stop the permafrost from continuing to melt and release methane.
And feedback loops: permafrost melting releases CO2 and methane, which cause more warming, causing more permafrost melting, and then more CO2 and methane release, and so on...
The area involved is huge: look at a globe, focus on northern Russia (esp. Siberia) and northern Canada. A huge area in which permafrost melt cannot be controlled in any meaningful way.
@@jondevaney6860 And we all forget about the clathrates in the ocean bottom ever more permafrost like situation the old biota rotting away could easily be released.
Please tell me this super computer was not powered by coal over several months to determine this.
Are you guys planning a counterpoint-type video on the reasons why black energy (coal, CH4, oil) plants are still being built and invested in even though green energy (solar, wind) are currently cheaper and faster to build?
Corruption.
Why not look at Germany, they shut down some 20 odd nuclear power plants and replaced them with unreliable solar and wind and made it somewhat reliable by adding new gen coal plants that work at 45% eff vs the old 30% coal of the 1950s. These Siemens coal burners now act as peaker plants turning on in 20 min vs several hours for the old gen coal.
And then compare the French and German per capita CO2 emissions, Germany wins there too, they have double the French emissions per capita because wll France mostly uses.......
Maybe PBS should do an educational video on how the grid actually works, in fact they used to do incredible videos on engineering before TH-cam took over
Hopefully we get to fusion soon, but in the meantime we have better renewable options and safer nuclear tech we could invest more in. Even battery tech is moving to safer and more abundant elements. But undoing this damage needs a moonshot effort and focus. And it starts by voting for leaders who care about the future, not lie about global warming. We are spending way more on disasters and will see things get worse for way more $$$ than going "green".
Simple men like Trump sometimes have a strength to appreciate nuclear, something in his tiny noggin likes nuclear but he does not know why, he has a sense of high energy density good. vs low energy density pointless. Meanwhile Biden also supported nuclear, but he could not get that word to pop out of his mouth fearing the wrath of the greens. And no, fusion is a complete sham of science, I could explain again but already did elsewhere. Search The Trouble With Tritium by Daniel Jassby.
Wonder why my comment below is hidden, well fusion power plants are in the realm of pixie dust, we do have fission though as you say and it only requires advanced materials working at temps of 1000K or less while fusion needs 100M K to even theoretically work, and it also requires water cooling a steel containment vessel that is being irradiated by those fast neutrons from the plasma leaving it as new radioactive waste and the magnets needs to be superconducting at liquid helium temps in the presence of neutron bombardment vessel and to keep the plasma from hitting the vessel and vaporising it. So many easy problems to solve. Come back in 1000 years and maybe it will be done. And there is the nagging problem of where will the tritium will come from, it exists only on earth because of the Candu reactors producing it in tiny amount. And breeding tritium is another mathematical fantasy, while uranium famously is chain reacting with a gain of 2.5 or so, lithium hit by neutrons will likely produce a replacement tritium at rates far below 1 when it needs to be well over 1. Flogging a dead horse here.
I welcome the solar punk future. Vegan cycle commuters rise up!
9:00 I mean I'm all in favor of dismantling coal plants, but is blowing them to kingdom come really a good idea? Think of all the soot, the concrete dust, the atomize officer furniture, asbestos, etc. that was probably in an old building like that that is now in the atmosphere slowly raining down on anybody and anything downwind. Seems crazy to me. Feels like when we have a huge unemployment rate there should be a civilian engineering corp that dismantles old buildings like this brick by brick so as to cause minimal environmental impact from the removal of old carbon-hogs like coal plants.
Is there any example of a large building successfully being dismantled piece by piece?
@@willjapheth23789aircraft carriers, maybe? This is rarely done for historic buildings to save them from things like sinkholes, but they're smaller than a coal plant.
Neither. Impossible nor inevitable. It’s completely possible. Also not obvious that we’re going to stop using fossil fuels until/unless they run out.
Shut down the coal plants and watch Midwest summers get much hotter. Pre coal burning days, (around 1955), Cincinnati averaged 14 days per decade of 100F heat. In the last 12 summers we’ve totaled zero days of 100F heat even though the planet is much hotter now. There is a stunning lack of summer record heat in the eastern US. 99.9999% of people are oblivious to this obvious fact. Just look at the NWS records.
De-ray-cho
This is a prime example of why more people need to get more prepared and think about "Emergency Preparedness Management" for both your home and vehicles. I am a TH-camr under my Full-Name with the same profile picture as this post with 53 videos covering 30 different category topic subjects sharing my personal knowledge and experiences with others to help others improve their overall adult lives. I've got videos on building yourself a high quality 24-72 Hour Survival Bug Out Bags, Home and Vehicle Preparedness and Readiness advice videos, Several different Financial Literacy advice videos, a Personal Property Insurance Excel and Photos Tracker, Scammer Warning Signs advice, Basic Vehicle Maintenance Services and Purchasing advice, and more!
INEVITABLE, of course.
At 7:38 when you were filming yourself inside a moving car you didn't put your seatbelt on. That's a bad example to set.
Fossils are more profitable than renewables. That’s the problem.
Renewables depend on fossil power to make them work until they reach some limit where it breaks, but Renewable fans don't know or care to know how the grid really works. It's like a giant AC battery when sunshine is free and so on
I low-key hate that silly titles and thumbnails like this are necessary for the algorithm.
You produce a lot of CO2 mining/manufacturing the solar panels/wind turbines. They will produce CO2 savings over time but not during the implementation. Personally I don't believe CO2 is a significant factor. Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas. My understanding is that historically CO2 increases following temperature increases rather than causing it. Indeed I don't think there is a relationship between CO2 and temperature. To think the earth will stabilise is wrong - we already have had an exceptionally long period of stable temperature. Variation is really a normal. It'll be interesting what develops.
If batteries are 90% cheaper, why aren't the batteries I buy 90% cheaper? They cost more.
If you buy small consumer batteries meant for small appliances, they carry steep premiums because the manufacturers wanna exploit you. They are talking about buying them in bulk in a "raw" form , that has become much chraper.
Musk used to talk about the EV battery pack costing $400 per KWhr now heading towards the $100 today and that is huge. Try and buy cells to build your own experimental EV device and its still $400/KWhr. Besides batteries can never have the energy density of fuels and there is limited opportunity to make them much cheaper. And there is the resource limitation of the rare metals needed. Sodium Ion batteries could break that logjam though.
@johnjakson444 I regularly buy them for 200€/kwh, what are you talking about? Buy raw cells from bulk stores, they are cheaper...don't buy them from regular electronic chains...
@@TheEsseboy I was thinking of the typical fully packaged generator type systems with management and cooling, I assume Musk was doing the same when he talked about prices in his talks. I would expect the cells to be about 50% of the system cost.
@ They are not, they are majority of the cost, the management and conversion boards are cheap compared to batteries, again, when you are ordering thousands of them.
I just wish we saw nuclear as viable of a replacement as natural gas is seen now
Maybe you haven't thought this true, but industrialized civilization is heading toward collapse because it is ecologically unsustainable, so here's the question. When lots of nations collapse and can no longer keep the power grid on, is it a good or bad idea to have hundreds or thousands of operating nuclear plants that would go into meltdown?
Hey Maya, I always enjoy this show, informative and well explained. Not knowing if these are fake or real and hope these are real, I have this remark with no malicious intentions on your behalf. If your so sensible to climate change and environment problems we cause, are your long finger nails are actually real? If not, what you speak does not match your behaviour !
If only the grid could be hardened as quickly as these coal plants could be shut down (or sooner!). Be mindful that solar panel technologies are made in China and the tariffs will be painful for the consumer.
Your title makes NO sense. Clean energy is not in charge of its own transition.
The local coal stove factory just redesigned their coal stoves for 2025 and they're seeing record sales. My state also banned any new natural gas hookups, so the options are heat pumps, oil heat, or coal heat. Also, with the new tariffs, the price of natural gas and electricity is now sky high, so people are looking for cheaper alternatives. Roughly 50% of my local power comes from renewable sources and most of those come from Canada. And now canadian prices are up by 25%. Coal is now the cheapest source of heat for New England, followed by oil and biofuel. Portable diesel heaters are also extremely popular here. When heat pumps become portable, then we can have a clean energy transition. As it stands, oil, diesel and coal are still the choice heating fuels for Northern states.
Well if you want to pay more as well as face the consequences of climate change that's up to you.
How long do you want to use the stove? Dp you think it will stay the same?