There are NO proposals to "drastically cut their emissions NOW" even by the most aggressive campaigners against climate change - like Hansen. What is being called for is action to initiate a
process that results in some amount of emissions reductions by X date - the specifics of how much and by when varies according to the plan - but most target 2030 and 2050 as benchmark dates. That is the nature of the agreements you are worried about, so you can see how you are overstating the case a bit.
Sure, if you had a magic wand to wave who wouldn't do it NOW, but lacking that the process that we have to follow is actually not going all that badly.
Pay attention this time, please, because I'm repeating what you ignored before - if the only route to ending carbon emissions were grand global agreements you are correct, we would be screwed. But it isn't. As I already told you most policy experts in the field have had little to no hope for such an agreement since about 2003. As a result everyone, including political forces that actually are worried about climate change have been working the economics of noncarbon energy and conservation. They are having a great deal of success even though the payoff in terms of bulk reduction of emissions hasn't made itself manifest yet. Among other things what we
are seeing is the rapid development of a large-scale manufacturing base for the advanced batteries that will largely get us off of petroleum, a similar large-scale manufacturing base for solar** and wind, and a global rethinking of where the best buys in energy are.
Take this example of what ONE wind turbine factory will do at the 10 and 20 year mark. You already hear about this kind of manufacturing going up every day, but you'll be hearing even more going forward. And what you will not hear is when a 30 turbine wind farm goes up or when the local WalMart shifts their store to solar.
It is great to be eager to fix the problem, but you need to actually understand what is being done that is effective if you are actually going to be part of the solution.
This gives you a good overview of the approach that is working:
http://rmi.org/Reinventing+Fire+Solutions+Journal+Fall+2009And this is the example wind farm I wrote of above:
In the time it takes to plan and build one nuclear plant, the turbines produced and installed from one wind turbine factory will have produced 54 reactor-years worth of electricity. Their aggregate annual output will equal that of 10 nuclear reactors.
A plant manufacturing wind turbines just upgraded their manufacturing process and can put out 2.5GWe of wind turbines per year. You can read the story here:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/10/automation-speeds-up-turbine-production?cmpid=WindNL-Wednesday-October19-2011At the end of ten years this single plant should be responsible for manufacturing about 25 GWe of wind turbines.
I estimated the total amount of electricity produced as the turbines come online over time and at the end of that 10 years, operating at 33% capacity, they would have provided a cumulative total of approximately 389.7 TWh.
I selected 10 years because this is the time it would take to build complete one nuclear plant project if it doesn't suffer delays - and they almost always do.
One nuclear plant actually produces about 7 TWh each year.
So devoting approximately the same resources to each technology gives us, at the end of 10 years:
- 10, 000 Wind turbines producing 72 TWhs of electricity per year
the 54 years worth of production from the nuclear plant that the wind turbines have already cranked out.
OR
- One nuclear plant that might be ready to begin to producing 7TWh per year.
Given the standard 20 year life span for the turbines and assuming the plant continued production of the same product, this factory will max out it's contribution to growth of wind power at 50GWe when it hits the 20 year mark and starts to build replacements for those wearing out.
That 50GW of turbines should actually produce approximately 144 TWh of electricity every year.
50GW faceplate capacity X .33 capacity factor = 16.5GW of production
That 16.5GW equals approximately twenty (20) 1GW nuclear reactors operating at the international average capacity factor of about 80%.
That's one factory making what is now a rather small 2.5MW wind turbine...
ETA: I forgot the solar footnote. In 2003 the DOE said that if we, as leaders of world solar production, could built 3Gigawatts of solar panel manufacturing capacity by 2020 (counting on the policies built by grand coalition agreements) then we would be making significant progress in building the base for solar to make a meaningful and substantial contribution to solving climate change.
By the end of this year China will have built
35 GW of solar manufacturing capacity and the global number will be between 45-50 GW.
That is 45-50GW instead of 3GW and in 2011 instead of 2020.
Are those two example (wind solar) specific enough to help illustrate my claim?
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