Brazil is ALL-IN on Renewable Energy and Electric Vehicles

@Media_Truth,

Wanted to add a bit about the availability of information comments you made above. Yes there is a lot of information out there. But it’s fragmented and not all in one easily accessible format. Because this issue is so controversial and it’s advantageous for the two tribes to remain focused on curated information it’s rare to get comprehensive information from any one or even a few sources.

Also, posts like mine above on the big picture of EV, pollution, subsidization, etc. involve time spent thinking about the disparate bits of information and putting them together. I didn’t just know Indonesia is playing both ends. Or that the highly subsidized companies from China are the ones building captive coal hand over fist in Indonesia.

It took me months of reading, thinking and applying pattern recognition to the information to have enough understanding of it all to put together that post. I’m blessed with ample amounts of time to just think about things. Most people don’t have that and I wish they did.


Opinion alert:

I believe the environment and other aspects of life including politics would be better and less tribal if everyone spent more time thinking and less time reacting to cues from their tribal elders.

 

Are you referring to trees as the "biological solution"? They sequester a lot of CO2, but some of that is returned as CO2 (wildfires, wood-burning for heat, etc), and the rest is a fraction of the manmade CO2.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/planting-trees-climate-change-carbon-capture-deforestation

Earth’s forests absorb, on average, 16 billion metric tons of CO2 annually, researchers reported in the March Nature Climate Change. But human activity can turn forests into sources of carbon: Thanks to land clearing, wildfires and the burning of wood products, forests also emit an estimated 8.1 billion tons of the gas back to the atmosphere.

That leaves a net amount of 7.6 billion tons of CO2 absorbed by forests per year — roughly a fifth of the 36 billion tons of CO2 emitted by humans in 2019.

My Opinion --- I am not a fan of Nuclear at all. I truly believe that there is way too much radioactive waste in the world today, and that it is the cause of a myriad of health problems for mankind (cancers, etc). I believe nuclear power and weaponry are one of the most immoral choices of our generation, in this small time-slice of human history,. There are no national or international repositories (I heard France was trying to develop one - don't know the status) for low level nuclear wastes - these are the wastes with the half-lives in the hundreds of thousands of years. Current containment in the US is on-site, at nuclear power plants. The containment must be rated for 200 years. That's it! Future generations will inherit all these wastes, and will be forced to manage it, while reaping no benefits from it.

 

Trees are just part of the solution. In some environments like large parts of California, native grasses are far better at sequestering carbon than trees.

https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/news/grasslands-more-reliable-carbon-sink-than-trees/

Savanna ecosystems are better than most any ecosystem except wetlands for storing carbon.

Actually the quickest solution is agricultural based. We have huge available carbon sinks in depleted soils worldwide. All it takes to sequester massive amounts of carbon is to increase soil organic matter in these soils by a percentage point or less.

Cover crops. Reduced tillage. Biochar. Silvopasture food production. Simple things that reverse existing soil carbon emissions and turn the trend to net sequestration.

Ag is my thing. I have all kinds of simple, economical, fast remedies that are not forest based. Here is one I’ve proposed before on PF.

I formulated this solution a while back so some of the price data may have changed.

It can be as simple as seeding abandoned played out farmland to alfalfa in third world countries. If we do nothing, we have wasteland possibly indefinitely. If we go to Alibaba we can get a metric ton of alfalfa seed FOB South Africa for $95 USD. That will seed about 150 acres. Shipping is going to cost you, so let’s say it triples the cost. You are now looking at $1.90/acre in seed. If alfalfa hasn’t been grown on that land previously, we should inoculate the seed with Rhizobium meliloti to ensure optimal nitrogen fixation occurs. This will add about $2.00 to our seed cost for a total of $3.90/acre.

Alfalfa seed can be sown by hand, by a grain drill, aerially, or by any type of dry fertilizer spreader/applicator. So add whatever cost you want there. In most cases hand sowing and running a herd of goats over it after sowing (to ensure good seed to soil contact) is sufficient for what we are looking at here.

So what is our return on our outlandish $4/acre investment? We get a plant that controls erosion. It is one of the most deep rooted herbaceous plants (up to 50 ft) and is a perineal. It produces it’s own nitrogen needs and will leave a minimum of 100 lbs/acre of nitrogen (one of the biggest limiting nutrients in sustenance farming) in the soil for another crop if the land is put back into production. Alfalfa can sequester 1400lbs of CO2/acre the first season of growth—much more than first year tree plantings. Compared to a maple forest, alfalfa will outperform the forest in sequestration for the first 20 years of the forest life. The carbon sequestered by alfalfa is deep underground where it is not vulnerable to oxidation.

Alfalfa is very good at loosening soil and allowing better infiltration of precipitation events. It “mines” moisture deep underground other crops can’t ever access. Alfalfa uses symbiotic relationships with soil microbes to mine minerals from deep soils that also become available to following crops.

In short, you get fertile protected soil with as much stored carbon as you would get from a forest of similar age. You get a plant that supplies it's own nitrogen (trees would struggle to survive in the same depleted soils alfalfa thrives in) and leaves nitrogen for other plants when it’s gone. So for $4/acre you get all this compared to eroding bare soil if you do nothing.

Nuclear doesn’t bother me. I understand your concerns though. It’s just so much better all the way around than particulates that harm human health, black carbon that melts glaciers, etc. from fossil fuels

 

Yes, I like the idea of grasses, alfalfa, etc to sequester CO2. It's a good partial solution. Obviously from the attached chart, mankind is still not making much progress (54 ppm increase since 2000), even though efforts are ongoing. I think the world collectively is making a little progress with electricity generation and transportation. I question the progress being made with heating and cooling of homes. I live in a passive solar, bermed home, with massive amounts of thermal mass. It requires no heating or cooling (only about 5-8 woodburning fires per year). If you search thermal mass homes on YouTube, you'll find a lot of people, around the world using this approach for NetZero homes. It's one approach, and may not work as well in inner cities, because of the larger required land footprint.


https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

 

The earth is greening as we speak. The increase in CO2 has been very beneficial for plant life in general and specifically agricultural crops.

 

Maybe so, in some areas, but there will be a lot of devastating effects. We're already seeing it. In my area - it's wildfires - bigger, longer duration, and much harder to contain. The extended summer months also extends the wildfire season. We are in the early stages of climate change. The situation will get a lot worse in decades to come. Until the CO2 on that graph that I posted, levels out, and starts coming down, things will get worse. And these climate disasters will continue until the CO2 curve starts heading downward. That could easily take hundreds of years. Floods, hurricanes, monsoons, tidal waves will all displace large populations. Mass refugees, hunger, and wars could easily be the end result.

 

There have been no devastating effects of global warming and the IPCC is not predicting any increase in the occurrence of floods, hurricanes, monsoons, and tidal waves. There is no climate catastrophy. Global warming is net beneficial for the next ~ 3 degrees Centigrade. The current global warming which started ~ 150 years ago is not the result of the increase human CO2 emissions although those emissions may be contributing.

 

Disagree heartily, but going to bed.

 

You're talking science when it comes to agriculture, but then ignoring the most basic tenant of atmospheric science. Warmer temperatures allow the atmosphere to hold more water. Couple this with the fact that warmer oceans cause more powerful tropical storms, and we're creating a recipe for disaster.

 

That is not happening.

 

And that is DENIAL.

 

Show us the data. You can’t because the data does not show an increase in frequency and intensity over the last 150 years. In fact the data shows the opposite.

 

Your data is severely lacking, especially from an International standpoint (note that this thread is about Brazil).

https://www.statista.com/outlook/mmo/electric-vehicles/worldwide

• In 2024, the revenue in the Electric Vehicles market is projected to reach a staggering US$623.3bn worldwide.
• Looking ahead, it is expected that the market will demonstrate a steady annual growth rate (CAGR 2024-202 of 9.82%.
• This growth will ultimately lead to a projected market volume of US$906.7bn by 2028.

 

Those projections are wrong.

 

Not evident in the data.

 

Sorry, but the data do not support claims of more wildfires, more droughts or floods, more or stronger storms, or increasing crop failures.

 

I'm not interested in projecting most positive info about electric cars is false.

 

Since you don't fall under the "scientist" category, that means you fall under the "social media" category. What arrogance!

https://theconversation.com/the-97-...he-evidence-is-even-stronger-than-that-170370

Despite the overwhelming evidence, it’s still common to see politicians, media commentators or social media users cast doubt on the role of humans in driving climate change.

But this denialism is now almost nonexistent among climate scientists, as a study released this month confirms. US researchers examined the peer-reviewed literature and found more than 99% of climate scientists now endorse the evidence for human-induced climate change.

That’s even higher than the 97% reported by an influential 2013 study, which has become a widely cited statistic by both climate change deniers and those who accept the evidence.

 

The actual data do not support your contentions. The IPCC acknowledges that.

That 97% statistic is fake. It's actually 0.3%.

Are you familiar with the scientific method?

 

A link for that whopper, undoubtedly taken out of context.

Your first sentence is correct. The second sentence should say 99%.

I have a Bachelor's of Science degree, so I'm part of the 99%. Not part of the Social Media denier club.

 

All of this has been covered in detail in other threads in this sub forum. Please review those. I for one am not interested in going through everything all over again.

The enhanced CO2 Effect hypothesis of global warming does not explain the entirety of the current 150 year modern global warming period. The models have coefficients which have been tweaked so that they agree somewhat with a short part of those 150 years. The models cannot match the temperature data for the entire 150 years. Therefore the models cannot be used to forecast the future.

You say that you are part of the 99% - what is your understanding of what that means?

I am assuming that by disclosing that you have a Bachelor of Science degree that you understand the scientific method - is that correct?

 

You can't refute the data by calling names.

 

[QUOTE="Media_Truth, post: 1074710821, member: 73276"

I have a Bachelor's of Science degree, so I'm part of the 99%. Not part of the Social Media denier club.[/QUOTE]

Bachelor of Science merely means you did not have to take a foreign language (as required for a Bachelor of Arts). The major could, for example, be Sociology.

 

Repeated to correct my copying error:

Bachelor of Science merely means you did not have to take a foreign language (as required for a Bachelor of Arts). The major could, for example, be Sociology.

 

That humans control climate ... THAT'S arrogance.