=energy =global warming =technology
What are some plans for reducing global warming that are particularly ineffective relative to their costs and inconveniences?
garbage sorting regulations
California
will require residents to separate all food waste into a separate
container. Anaerobic fermentation makes methane, which increases
global warming more than CO2. That's the main reason why the California
government is banning putting food waste in normal garbage: as a mitigation
for global warming. It would rather
have food waste go to aerobic compost sites, where microbes would make CO2
instead.
In a landfill, methane generation only starts after the oxygen runs out,
which generally takes at least a few months. Then, you can put a plastic
sheet over the landfill and use pipes to remove the methane (and CO2 and
other stuff) generated by fermentation. That kind of landfill gas capture is
very practical and widely used in US landfills today. The gas can then be
burned in a turbine on site or purified into natural gas.
Aerobic
composting also increases the total amount of gas generated, and typically
uses vehicles to turn compost piles. If you want to make new anaerobic
digestion plants, that's expensive.
Composting only makes any sense
when it's used to make soil to grow plants in, but even then, it's not worth
spending more than a minute per kilogram doing that. If a banana peel takes
5 extra seconds to compost instead of putting it in the garbage, it's not
worth it.
This mandate will be very hard to enforce. Are police going
to break open garbage bags to look for food scraps, and identify where the
bags came from? I don't think so. Because of the extra work involved and the
impracticality of enforcement, many people won't follow this mandate, which
will contribute to the erosion of respect for rule of law.
"clean coal"
Coal power in the US is already too expensive. Adding
CO2 capture only makes it more expensive. IGCC is more expensive than using
boilers. The US government lacks engineering competence and is thus unable
to write good contracts or choose companies well. Put it all together, and
you get $7 billion spent on
a project that never operates before getting
demolished.
CO2
capture with amines uses a lot of heat at ~120C to strip CO2 from liquid,
usually from low-pressure steam. In this sense, it's a natural pairing with
coal (or biomass) power: the expensive low-pressure steam turbines would be
replaced by CO2 capture, reducing efficiency but also capital costs. This
logic doesn't apply to the Kemper Project, which was designed to use coal
gasification and gas turbines. CO2 capture is cheaper at higher
concentrations, so CO2 capture costs go: sugar fermentation gas < flue gas <
gas turbine exhaust << air. (The cheapest source of captured CO2 is ammonia
synthesis, where CO2 separation is done even if the CO2 isn't needed.) Maybe
figure out what you're going to do with the CO2 from concentrated sources
before trying to capture it from the air, eh?
Anyway, clean coal
absolutely can't compete with just not using coal in the first place.
hydrogen fuel
Hydrogen fuel
research is a scam. All the money and researcher time put into PEM fuel
cells and water electrolysis and hydrogen storage systems was worse than
wasted: it's built up a constituency that can lobby for continued funding,
and got some labs into a position where they can't work on anything else.
mandatory rooftop solar
California
now
requires that new buildings have solar panels on them.
Rooftop solar is ~2.6x as expensive as utility-scale solar and never made
economic sense.
Installing things on roofs is relatively expensive, the work is relatively
dangerous, and it's better to turn solar panels (on 1 axis) towards the sun
instead of having them fixed. (Those same panels would make more electricity
if not on roofs.) Solar panels over parking lots makes sense, but putting
them on roofs does not. That also makes it harder to install skylights,
which are more efficient than turning light into electricity and back into
light.
California charges people $0.20/kWh for electricity, which
would be enough to produce 100% of it renewably, but half of that's going to
corruption.
washing plastic
Some people wash
disposable plastic food containers in order to recycle them. This certainly
isn't a good use of time, and it's rather questionable whether it's helpful at all.
Recycling metals makes sense. Recycling clear PET bottles makes sense
now, and colored PET might be worthwhile in the future. Polyethylene and
polypropylene recycling might never make more sense than incineration, and a
lot of what goes into recycling today is just put in landfills anyway. PVC
(and receipts) shouldn't be recycled at all because they have hazardous
chemicals in them.
I understand the sentiment. People are told global
warming is a big deal, plastic waste is a big deal, and recycling is a big
deal for environmental reasons, so some people go to great lengths to avoid
putting plastic in landfills. Well, the result is particularly susceptible
people doing some crazy things and becoming neurotic, but if you compare it to the messaging on COVID,
or say, Iraqi WMDs, I guess it could still be worse.
If you're concerned
about global warming, then flying less or telecommuting to work more does
have some impact to the extent that other oil demand is price-inelastic.
Getting a heat pump or better insulation might also be reasonable. But the
fact is, there's really not much you can do as an individual. So the
important thing is to pressure your representatives...or rather, it would be
if political leaders were competent at all, but they and their advisors are
too dumb about technology for pressuring them to accomplish anything.
And of course, there's really nothing you can do to stop China from
burning all its coal. That's why some people are so enthusiastic about
direct air capture of CO2 and using it for stuff on a large scale: their
ideology of techno-optimism is that there must be a viable complete
technological solution, and direct air capture isn't completely ruled out as
a complete solution as far as they can tell, so it must work.
cylindrical solar cells
Yes, I can't help but bring up
Solyndra again, because cylindrical solar panels are such an obviously dumb
idea that it says a lot about the competence level of the US government and
investors.
If you pressure
politicians for action on global warming or environmental issues, the result
is bans on stuff for new construction, bans on plastic straws, and
investments comparable to Solyndra and the Kemper Project.