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  • didirius replied to the topic Climate Change in the forum Science and Technology 3 years, 6 months ago

    @mrmhead Regarding the “mobile energy” parts. I wonder if there has been any comprehensive studies on the new “Electric Car” push. Sure, at the “local level” the GHG emission of an electric car is 0 compared to the standard combustion engine. But has anyone accounted for how the electricity is generated (coal fired plants?) And transmitted. Also, what is the comparative pollution created in Producing an electric car vs standard combustion?

    I know what you mean. Briefly search found this for start. https://www.zemo.org.uk/assets/workingdocuments/MC-P-11-15a%20Lifecycle%20emissions%20report.pdf

    Another rabbit-hole inquiry: As we all know energy is neither created or destroyed – it is just transformed. Fossil fuels use the energy that is stored in coal, oil, etc. Wind and Solar energy is taking energy out of the environment. What was that energy doing before we hijacked it?

    Sure it’s pretty minimal at this stage in the game. And so was dumping waste into waterways a few hundred years ago. But scale it up, over a long term …?

    Solar – instead of warming the ground, we intercept it and use it in other ways.

    Wind – Our weather patterns are totally dependent on the wind. “What if we change the wind” – Sounds like a fanciful dream, but isn’t that what we’re doing with wind turbines?

    Most energy was and is fusion energy radiated by the local sun. A bit (including rotation) was energy from the forming planet. And another small amount is radioactive material. All the energy stored in fosile carbon was sunlight converted by photosythesis in the past. Solar energy so to speak. In the energy cycle this carbon based molecules are merely a battery.

    As for Wind and Solar energy hijacked, there is never 100% of it absorbed, only reduced. No wind park is able to stop the wind. And in the long term, wind is always replenished by the inbalance of pressure and temperature in the atmosphere caused by the light. The primary energy source here is the sun. And to hijack all the solar energy from the planet you’d have to cover it in shadow. By using this sources you only borrow a small amount of its energy which in the end will be released again due to general heatloss in transformation.