Rayman Pirate-Community

Funnily enough, those arguments are probably used both by climate change deniers who want to keep burning fossil fuels and by extremist environmentalists and other degrowth fanatics who would rather send us back to the stone age. The same people who oppose nuclear energy when it's clearly the only short-term solution to climate change.

So I've been reading about hydroelectricity lately, which everyone knows is a renewable energy source, which dates back much further than wind, solar, etc. But apparently, it's not actually emissions-free…

Basically, because the reservoirs are full of detritus, microbiological activity leads to the production of methane, which gets released into the atmosphere as the water levels fluctuate, and in particular as the turbines agitate water drawn in from the deepest levels. Seemingly this has only recently been figured out, so in most places it's not even being assessed and factored into emissions figures. It makes me wonder how many other emissions blind spots we have…

Seemingly it could be mitigated by reducing nutrient runoff upstream, ensuring the reservoirs are oxygenated, and drawing water into the turbines from shallower levels. These all sound really difficult changes to make to existing installations though. It's a pity there's no way to harvest the methane, since burning it would change it to just CO2, which is much less potent as a greenhouse gas, and could actually produce more power…

When I mentioned this to my mother, she suggested someone could do a study to figure out how much methane is emitted by Ireland's eight dams, and compare it with what would be emitted by additional cattle herds if farmland hadn't been flooded to create the dams' reservoirs, but instead developed in accordance with the country's questionable agriculture policies over the last few decades…

It's quite an unfortunate coincidence that you bring up dams and three days later, one suffers a catastrophic failure in Ukraine!

Yeah, that's absolutely awful I can scarcely believe they actually went and blew up the Kakhovka dam, it's just going to cause so many problems for absolutely everyone (including the Russians I'd say). Those poor people…