The alternative being... what? The burning of coal and oil wastes CO2, and that waste, building up in the atmosphere, cooks the planet. Agriculture is already suffering (and agriculture is NOT just someone else's problem, if you want to survive).
Chemistry allows us to make quantities of molecules that we do not find in nature. That's called 'chemical engineering', and it's a useful discipline; it's possible to re-engineer a ship motor, or to clean up atmospheric CO2, and... it makes sense to consider those, and other options. If our technology has to be stretched to cover some novel processes, then let's stretch it.
I think we all agree that the days of cheap fuel just coming out of a hole in the ground are numbered. We'll have to find alternatives and it will be more expensive. In my opinion, all the ado about CO2 is exaggerated. There have been times in the past where the concentration was much higher than even the most pessimistic current projections, and flora and fauna survived just fine, in fact, did very well indeed. Yes, there will be change. Nothing ever stays the same, whatever we do. Some will lose, some others will gain.
It's not a simple matter of doing some chemistry. The process needs to be economically viable, not waste more energy than we already do, and not produce more and/or nastier pollutants than we already do. That's a pretty tall order, or we'd already be doing it.
Current ship's motors are filthy, even the little ones. It shouldn't be too hard to clean them up a bit. And you should see the stuff they burn in the big ones! It's not even liquid enough to be pumped around at room temperature and it hasn't been desulfurized either. Disgusting, but cheap. That's economy in action.
That said, I'm pretty confident that economy alone will prevent ammonia from going anywhere as a fuel. Maybe, just maybe, it can serve as a medium for energy storage in an industrial setting, although I believe there are far better ways to do that. The problem will be governmental mandates. I have little confidence that our collective governments will be able to do the right thing.
Jeroen Belleman (who still remembers when natural gas was just wasted, because it wasn't economically viable to actually use it.)
Yeah, that's a stupid argument. The production of grain is adjusted by the producers to suit market conditions, and a population expands along with ... the market. That indicator doesn't measure arable land or favorable climate. Beef production in Texas shows lessening since 1975, which DOES speak to grazing land not doing well in a changing climate.
Bushels per acre is economically important for growers: they have to pay for acres, but get paid for bushels. That argument means improvement in management, or soil treatment, or prediction, or speaks to less-productive land (parched, too hot?) going OUT of grain production entirely. It tells us nothing about total land area being productive.
Yeah, most of those leaves are weeds. The parts of our crops that matter are not entirely the chlorophyll-containing ones, we don't NEED reassurance of the presence of pigment.
Missing the ball, three strikes: John Larkin is out.
It isn't. Solar cells are now the cheapest electricity source around and by a wide enough margin to cover the extra cost of the grid storage you need to make it work. Wind turbines are the next cheapest source. Utility power generators aren't looking at anything else when they invest in new generating capacity. They've got a lot of legacy investment in generating equipment that burns fossil carbon, and some recent investment in fast start gas turbine powered generation which is a tolerable substitute for grid storage in coping with intermittent generation, but the long term trend is obvious.
It's an ill-informed opinion. You are referring to
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"Fossil records for many organisms show major turnovers. For example, in the marine realm, a mass extinction of benthic foraminifera, a global expansion of subtropical dinoflagellates, and an appearance of excursion, planktic foraminifera and calcareous nanofossils all occurred during the beginning stages of PETM. On land, modern mammal orders (including primates) suddenly appear in Europe and in North America. "
We are likely to be one of the species who would have a hard time coping with the changes in the environment. The sudden appearance of "new orders of mammals" does imply that the older orders of mammals who had been occupying the relevant ecological niches had gone extinct.
We are the dominant species at the moment, so we are pretty much certain to be one of the losers. We are famously adaptable, but we are changing the climate about a hundred times faster than it changed back then which is a very severe test.
Generating electric power with solar cells and windmills doesn't generate any pollution at all. Making the solar cells and digging up the minerals we need to make the solar cells and the wind turbines is less innocent, but we should be able to cope.
When the coal mining and oil extracting interests largely dictate what governments end up doing, your pessimism is understandable, As the electorate gets a better grasp of what's gong on, those kinds of governments do tend to get kicked out.
Australia now has a Labour government (left wing) rather than a Liberal government (right wing). Both parties lost votes in the election to greener candidates, but the Liberal party lost more.
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