That used to be true but the use of coal has declined in recent years. It’s a little hard to read but coal amounts to 34% of electric generation:
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And the cost of solar and wind has come way down, too. They’re both about the same as gas now and considerably cheaper than coal:
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Looking at various energy charts show different % just for coal in electrical production for 2017. So once again, there is no actual concensus.
Can you point me to the other data you’re referring to? I wouldn’t be surprised to see some small variation from what I posted above but probably not all that much.
Following your chart. Coal only for what is defined there as electricity is 34%. Then add the other fossil fuels, it is 61% for electrical production. Renewable is only 17% of electrical production. So in effect it is coal powered more than any other source. But the vast majority of electricity production is fossil fuels as opposed to renewable.
Your last sentence is true. But it’s not quite right to equate all fossil fuels to coal. Burning coal produces lots more CO2 per kilowatt-hour of electric than does natural gas.
Electric vehicles just are not as green as people think because they don’t see the source of the electricity. They only think of it as clean electricity.
Oh, we’re well aware of this issue. And it’s a serious one. Electric vehicles are necessary but not sufficient to a complete solution to the whole problem. We need to address the all the other sources of greenhouse gases, too.
But even today with most electricity generated from fossil fuels an EV is a win. The usual metric is “well-to-wheels” efficiency: how much CO2 will be produced counting all the steps along the way to propel a vehicle a given distance. EVs win here just because electric motors are so much more efficient in turning energy in to motion. About 4x as much. Only about 20% of the energy in your gas tank ends up pushing the car forward, the rest is lost as heat. But an electric motor turns 80% or 85% of the energy in the battery to motion. (This is the main reason you don’t see big radiators in the front of EVs.) A modern gas-fired electric power plant’s efficiency can be as high as 50% (best case). So the EV comes out about 2x better. (Of course, there are a zillion other factors in a detailed analysis but they’re relatively small.) And this only gets better as we transition electric generation to clean technologies.
Exactly what goes into the other engery uses is a little less clear. Renewable only accounts for 5% of transportation use for example. Some uses cross these lines.
I’m not quite sure what your point is here.
I guess you had no counter points to my other arguments.
Sorry, I thought I addressed the argument about past climate cycles before. The point is that sure, the Earth was a lot hotter at various points in the past and the biosphere adapted (though in some cases that adaptation involved the extinction of a majority of the extant species). That’s really not relevant to our current situation for two reasons. First, the current man-made change is happening MUCH faster than the previous ones (a few decades instead of a few millennia). That makes adaptation much more difficult (eg, we’ve already lost huge chunks of the world’s coral reefs). And second, what matters most immediately is the adaptation that our societies will have to make. While we can with some confidence predict the physical consequences of various greenhouse scenarios (eg sea level rise) it’s much more difficult to predict the human responses to them, especially in less developed countries (eg loss of agricultural production, mass migration, war). The best case scenarios (2 degrees C) don’t look like much fun. The worst cases (6 or 8 degrees) look a LOT worse. Looking at past climate cycles tells us a lot about how the physical world and the biosphere may react but it doesn’t say anything about how human societies will. Back during the last ice age cycle when the total human population was just a few million and stone tools were high-tech it was a lot easier to adapt and we had thousands of years to do it. Nowadays it’s harder and the time scale is far shorter. If things get so out of control that we have a nuclear war then it really is game over. Do I think that’s likely? No. Do I want to take even a small chance of that? No way!
One way to think about this is as a sort of insurance policy. If there’s even a small change that the worst might happen it’s sensible to spend some amount to avoid it. How much depends on your evaluation of the probabilities and the costs.