Renewable energies are all supposed to be used together to support one another. When its night or cloudy, wind and hydro picks up the slack. When there is no wind, solar and hydro pick it up. When there is a surplus of energy (its sunny and windy out) use it to pump water uphill into a reservoir so that it can be used in hydro another time. Add batteries for more storage to help stabilize the grid when there is high demand until other sources can be activated.
Edit: i was just talking about renewables with this comment. I mention nuclear elsewhere and fully agree we need more of that all working together.
Are these batteries super easy to make and produce? Accounting for the production and mining of all these minerals for the batteries and the solar, is it still better than nuclear?
Here is a neat video to watch about why nuclear is the solution, not renewables, and why one side is preventing it from happening. https://youtu.be/diHish6yC1g?si=_BQNfgBl8fAyTMuL
The problem isn't the choice between nuclear and solar; it's that over the past 40 years we had a choice between nuclear and coal, and atom panic caused us to pick coal.
And that's what's killing our civilization. So much damage has been done that even if we magically switched to 100% renewables right this second, we're still proper fucked.
Oh yeah, we just have to magically switch entirely to renewables, develop carbon capture tech that's way more efficient and scalable than we have right now, and do it 20 years ago. And not, say, invest in a ridiculously energy-heavy technology designed to make the richest richer while allowing average folks to generate as many pictures of Mario railing Luigi as they want.
Yeah man the plastic straw you don't use is absolutely going to counteract the thousands of datacenters popping up like weeds. Saving anything at this point would require a pretty much immediate overthrow of capitalism, and good luck if you think that's doable.
Frankly we lost this battle in the early 1980s when people got terrified of atoms. If we hadn't burned all that coal for the last generation and a half, we might conceivably be in a position to get out of this. Unfortunately we're in the afterparty at this point and it's only going to get so much worse.
Nah we're fucked. Organic life is the reproductive organs of machine life anyway. That's the only way this civilisation survives at this point and I don't think we can keep it together long enough to get there this time around anyway.
most of that could probably me made tho. People severely underestimate what we could do with our current techonology
its not made because of economics(I.E either too expensive or not profitable). TBH, most things that could be done to save the planet are not made because they're not profitable.
we're extinguishing ourselves, but aleast consider how much shareholder value is being created!
The problem though is that even if we did implement all the magic right now, and it all worked and wasn't riddled with ecotechbro grifts (SOLAR ROADWAYS!) it takes a long time for the increase to stop. It's not like if we went carbon zero tomorrow we'd start cooling off. All the damage we did over the past two generations is baked in and it's going to keep getting worse even if we start doing everything perfect right now.
Narrator: They're not doing everything perfect.
Ironically, if it weren't for the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s and 1980s, we might have stood a chance at getting out of this. Unfortunately atom panic led us to lean much more heavily on coal which is exponentially worse across the board,
i dunno, it seems nature corrects itself much more quickly than we think.
remember the pandemic? after a couple of weeks of quarantine, stuff was already changing back. Rivers getting clean, wildlife conditions improving, etc.
Earth is a very well regulated organism, we just happen to be the virus that imbalanced everything. If humanity began working on this tomorrow and completed this work in, lets say, a year, the improvement would probably follow a semi-exponential curve or smh smiliar.
Putting up a solar panel doesn't magically refreeze methane into permafrost, unfortunately.
It's going to take decades for any changes we make to really have an effect, and unfortunately, we really don't have decades left as a civilization. The warming we've already caused is about to drastically fuck up our food supply, and when that domino tips it's gonna get really bad, really fast.
While carbon removal is probably going to be required, stopping the excess output is going to be the main priority for sure. I think there's many carbon sinks existing naturally already - they are just all overloaded.
which is why im super excited about the strides fusion energy research has made. yeah the fuel is still a question but its still impressive that we have already managed to kickstart the reaction and hold it stable for some time
imo carbon capture thing is the one climate effort that i think is just human hubris. We produce tons of excess carbon in the form of farming waste already, we just need to figure out a way to prevent it from decaying, could be by reactivating bogs and swamps that we've drained extensively in the past or just sending it down every caves and abandoned mineshafts.
There is a company I have heard of that was taking carbon out of the atmosphere to combine it with hydrogen to make gasoline. And it was carbon negative. Last I heard they were being blocked by government red tape.
The chief problem is that even if all this stuff works and we implement it all right now there's such a long tail on climate damage that it's going to get even worse for a generation before it starts to get better.
And every technology we discover that might improve things is being offset by the decisions we're making as a civilization otherwise.
Oh I agree. Even if the company i was talking about started a few facilities on every continent and we're fully funded it would probably take at least a generation to ballance everything out. And if as a species we could stop pumping out pollution it would be better. But it would also be nice if the companies that make all the money from oil and pollutants were not able to push for less reform.
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u/Ketzer_Jefe Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
I see the sarcasm but will answer it any way.
Renewable energies are all supposed to be used together to support one another. When its night or cloudy, wind and hydro picks up the slack. When there is no wind, solar and hydro pick it up. When there is a surplus of energy (its sunny and windy out) use it to pump water uphill into a reservoir so that it can be used in hydro another time. Add batteries for more storage to help stabilize the grid when there is high demand until other sources can be activated.
Edit: i was just talking about renewables with this comment. I mention nuclear elsewhere and fully agree we need more of that all working together.