Monday, September 26, 2016

Tshering Tobgay: This country isn't just carbon neutral -- it's carbon negative.




Deep in the Himalayas, on the border between China and India, lies the Kingdom of Bhutan, which has pledged to remain carbon neutral for all time. In this illuminating talk, Bhutan's Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay shares his country's mission to put happiness before economic growth and set a world standard for environmental preservation. 


Bhutan is a Buddhist country that brings healing to its people and to our world.  The West needs to find a new way to happiness. At the moment it is run by psychopaths.


11 comments:

Kaivey said...

I could sense Tshering Tobgay peaceful, content happiness, and it was so inspiring. I'm going to go Buddhist but first of all I shall try the Western developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) route. ACT is non religious and so is suitable for everyone including people with different faiths.

Kaivey said...

I've just read all of MRW's replies to my other post on this subject (which I read only after I put this post out). I didn't put this out to continue the argument with MRW, I put this out because I genuinely liked it. Green energy is one of the things I'm interested in. It also gave me a way of introducing Eastern philosophy along with western developed ACT.

Ryan Harris said...

Description of troubles accommodating flood of green energy into the electrical grid and market. Good technical links at the end on the FERC study. The link is a right wing paper, but Andrew Follett is a good, fair journalist. Seems like most of the problems with increasing use beyond where we are at today will require modest changes to incentives and subsidies that encourage more transmission and storage rather than simply more installations. During peak hours, so much renewable electricity is produced in many areas that they are actually damaging the grid and equipment while driving prices negative because subsidies make it profitable to pay people to consume electricity. I know MNE doesn't like technical economic stuff, but it is interesting to see the government set the rules of the market and then watch what happens.

Kaivey said...

Thanks, Ryan.

Matt Franko said...

If everybody was carbon negative, how long until we are all dead? As there would no longer be any co2 in the atmosphere and all the plants would not grow i.e. No food?

Peter Pan said...

Volcanoes are carbon positive.

Kaivey said...

But that's a long way off.

Matt Franko said...

Ok then the question has to become how do we compare to volcanoes?

If we are a small fraction of volcanoes or other forms of carbon dioxide (methane?) then there's nothing we can do...

Peter Pan said...

CO2 is understood as a catalyst for subsequent feedback loops. The Earth has been warmer than it is today, that is not the issue. The issue is RATE OF CHANGE.

To answer your question, the annual CO2 output from volcanoes is 200 million tonnes:
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html
Or from 65-319 million tonnes:
https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm

Output of CO2: about 30 billion tonnes
Suffice to say that humans will not be removing 200 million tonnes of CO2 anytime soon.

Ryan Harris said...

Carbon dioxide shortage leads to reduced drought tolerance, desertification, c4 plants do ok, c3 die off. Carbon dioxide abundance causes increased plant cover, c3 gains advantage over c4. Glaciation causes co2 shortage so we have good knowledge of impact.

Kaivey said...

It's about getting the balance right. But I also found the video interesting because Bhutan society is so different to western society and its capitalist system. They have free health care and education. That's an investment in the people.