I recently thought... sure everyone says it's the CO², but then I saw articles that said, the CO² didn't change as much as they said it did. 4% of the atmosphere or so, because water takes it up and some kinds of stones do the same.
What if we generally just generate too much heat? And the heat gets trapped in the atmosphere? Every time someone uses energy, it generates heat. Everytime we make energy from hydrocarbon, we generate heat.
Would there be a way to let the heat go to space? Or if we want to preserve it on earth, a way to turn heat back into hydrocarbon?
CO2 did increase a lot. The ratio of CO2 in our atmosphere got up by more than 40% since 2 centuries ago. And that's despite effects which slow down the CO2 increase, like absorption by the ocean.
That's what CO2 does. It is a greenhouse gas, meaning it traps heat that would otherwise have escaped into space.
> Or if we want to preserve it on earth, a way to turn heat back into hydrocarbon?
It is literally impossible to turn heat, by itself, into anything useful. That's the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and it's a cruel mistress.
It's nice to think about alternative solutions to these problems, but you need to have at least a basic understanding of basic level physics if you want to discuss this sort of thing.
My biggest frustration with global warming deniers has been that I understood the basics of global warming as a 6-7 year old, when I first read something about the greenhouse effect (it wasnt even in the context of global warming).
The only basic pieces of information you need to understand climate change are:
1) The greenhouse effect exists. That is, when you have something like glass, it will let energy in in the form of light, but it won't let as much energy escape once it's converted to heat. This concept can be grasped by anyone who has walked into a car that has been parked out in the sun. And by the massive clue in the name, that is the existence of greenhouses.
2) Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas. That is, it acts like glass does in a greenhouse. This is harder to believe from first principles, but it's not that hard to believe. For me the clinching explanation (again, as a kid) was learning Venus was hotter than Mercury. And there is no reason to believe folks are lying about this, and I don't believe anyone is even contesting this.
3) Understanding how fossil fuels came into existence (basically, organic material trapped over centuries in the ground. again, the clue is in the name) and understanding the CO2 lifecycle, and how burning fossil fuels adds material to the CO2 lifecycle that was not there earlier. This isn't something that can be determined easily by a kid from 1st principles, but it's something that no one is really contesting either.
Once you accept these 3 fairly straightforward basic physics phenomena, global warming is inevitable.
The only questions are whether the release of CO2 is significant enough to have an impact, where we have to rely on measurements and scientists. But seeing that there was a fairly standard progression in how deniers would first deny global warming was ever happening, then deny that it was anthropogenic, then claim it wouldnt have as negative an impact, and now claim that well, it's too late...let's look at mitigation; I was able to filter them out when they were at step 1 itself.
Aside: I also want to point out the horrific misunderstanding people have about the terms "global warming" and "climate change" which are fairly self descriptive, but apparently is a nefarious effort to "hide the spike". Global Warming (i.e., more energy in the earth's ecosystem due to the greenhouse effect) leads to Climate Change (that is, changes in our climate behavior).
One is a cause, and the other is the effect. Both are valid and orthogonal concepts, and not some sort of conspiracy.
> 3) Understanding how fossil fuels came into existence (basically, organic material trapped over centuries in the ground. again, the clue is in the name) and understanding the CO2 lifecycle, and how burning fossil fuels adds material to the CO2 lifecycle that was not there earlier.
Adds material to the CO2 lifecycle that was not there earlier? Isn't it just rereleasing CO2 that was in the atmosphere earlier?
> Isn't it just rereleasing CO2 that was in the atmosphere earlier?
I don't know the facts here, but I'm pretty sure carbon can slowly be added from other sources. So sure, that CO2 might have been in the atmosphere before, but then we added more CO2 as well.
The point being, the CO2 we're digging up wasn't in our atmosphere before. The atmosphere that we and all the animal and plants have been adapted too. Sure, there's a time when the CO2 concentration (and even O2) was wildly different. But then there were other animals living on earth, that was adapted to those conditions. Slow change is fine, rapid change is disastrous.
Much of the coal comes from a unique period in earth's history when there were many trees, but enzymes that could deal with lignins hadn't yet evolved. Which led to a steady and significant accumulation of carbon in that coal.
Humans, and much of the life we see around us, evolved in the subsequent periods of higher oxygen and depleted CO2. As we reverse that effect, we return the atmosphere nearer to how it once was - when humans and such weren't around. The planet and its life will be fine. Us and the multiple species on which we depend may well not be.
By burning it we are releasing carbon that has been stored for millennia and accumulated over millennia. It's introduced as though it were new into our carbon cycle.
> now claim that well, it's too late...let's look at mitigation
That's a pragmatic position, not a denier's position. I'm very progressive but I realized long ago we were never going to get anywhere with the 'everyone reduce' strategy. We should have started looking at mitigation options decades ago.
Isn't the controversy over second order effects though?
For example water vapor contributes far more to warming than CO2. The calculations are all about CO2 increasing temperatures, increasing water evaporation, which then increases heat trapping.
If all it was was a simple first order "how much warming does co2, and co2 alone" produce, then there wouldn't be the arguing there is now.
If it was about honest discovery of scientific facts, then there wouldn't be the arguing there is now. In fact, outside of the US, there isn't much arguing (there are a few fringe climate deniers, but they're not mainstream). The problem is vested interests, and people burying their heads in the sand because they're unwilling to give up aspects of their lifestyles.
An important aspect of the impact part is that there are many highly non-linear processes. A change from -10 deg C to -7 deg C might not be a huge deal, but a change from -2 deg C to +1 deg C can be as ice melts around 0 deg C.
Another important aspect is that "average temperature" conceals change, by virtue of being an average. The average of (10, 10, 11, 13) is 11, but so is the average of (5, 7, 15, 17).
Comparing Venus to Earth is silly. Venus's atmosphere is mainly carbon dioxide. On Earth it is a trace gas, measured in parts per million.
Carbon dioxide blocks a narrow spectrum of radiation. It acts a lot like food coloring dye mixed in water. If you mix in a couple of drops, the change is dramatic, but if you double it and mix in a couple more, the change is much less so.
If the only effect on the atmosphere was the CO2 greenhouse effect, and we added 10x the CO2 the average global temperature would only rise a couple of degrees.
The issue and the controversy that surrounds CO2 is how the Earth will respond to this added heat that it can't get rid of. If it's a tipping point, and will end up in a death spiral of factors compounding upon each other (ex. the permafrost melts and changes the albedo of the earth and that causes more warming, etc.) is where the science of climate change actually is.
The problem is that climate is complicated and no one can predict exactly how it will behave. This is why there are ton of models and it seems no one can agree upon how much the effect will be.
Climate skeptics will argue this is because the science done so far is mostly conjecture and very weak, and the conspiratorial among them will say that only studies that support climate change are being published/funded, so there is a lot of bias to make out that their evidence is stronger than it is. There has also been a lot of modifications to historical temperature readings, (this seems to be with good justification), but I personally can't judge.
Whether the effect of CO2 is going to be large or small is outside of both of our grasps, and we really have to trust on others to make that determination, unless you're willing to really learn the science behind it.
However, your list of reasons are just muddying the situation even further. They are easily debunked and if you proclaim them, and people find out they don't hold muster, you may drive people further into the climate change skeptic camp, which I don't think you really are trying to do.
"It is literally impossible to turn heat, by itself, into anything useful. That's the 2nd law of thermodynamics"
That's not quite true/relevant.
Matter can be turned into energy, energy can be turned into matter, theoretically at least. More practically a Stirling engine or peltier will turn heat into electricity, and filament bulbs did a good enough job of turning heat into light.
Plus you can still cheat the 2nd law locally. I can heat my house in winter for example, it isn't just a slow uniform slide to the heat death of the universe.
> Matter can be turned into energy, energy can be turned into matter, theoretically at least.
None of these conversions are 100% efficient. The second law effectively puts limits on the efficiency of heat engines[1] that depend on the difference between “hot” and “cold” in the engine. At low temperature differences, the theoretical efficiency is extremely poor[2] and the practical efficiency is even worse.
I said "heat, by itself", not just "heat". And I stand by what I said. It is fundamentally correct. The state of entropy of the an isolated system will always increase over time.
Yes, you can bring in other things, like an outside system or additional useable energy, but that only disproves the misquoted version of my statement.
> you need to have at least a basic understanding of basic level physics if you want to discuss this sort of thing.
I'm sure when you talk to people like that it makes you feel really good and secure about your own beliefs and like you're on The Winning Team, but being a dick like this to someone who is asking a question makes everything more divisive and worse. If you like arguments and preserving your own sense of intellectual superiority over others, congratulations on perpetuating more of the same stagnation. If you're interested in anything productive, sorry, but you done goofed.
I am actually curious about how much land use changes and heat from human activities contributes to climate change.
Theoretically the limit to the number of people we could support on earth with unlimited energy (eg cheap fusion) is not limited by space or food or water (the later solved by energy) but by simple thermodynamics. We'd cook ourselves if there were too many of us. Note this happens at many orders of magnitude more population than we currently have.
IIRC someone crunched the numbers that even with unlimited fusion power, if you extrapolate the growth in energy use in the 20th century, we could only continue for ~200 years before significantly increasing global temperature due to waste heat.
An innocent-seeming 5% growth turns in to four orders of magnitude if it continues for two centuries.
Fascinating. Of course any exponential growth tends to come to an end long before the impossible predictions, but it still highlights what a unique time we live in where we take growth of the population and the economy for granted. It has to slow down in the "near" future. Near being probably fifty years or more.
People have done the math on the heat directly released by burning fossil fuels, and it isn't that high.
What CO2 does is keep more of the SUN'S heat on Earth. And that turns out to be a much more important contribution to the temperature of the Earth than the heat directly released by burning fossil fuels.
Current CO2 levels are a full 50% higher than they were 80 years ago or so, and that makes a big, big difference.
The total yearly energy consumption of the world is equivalent to
a couple hours of the total sun energy hitting the surface of the Earth,
so, I doubt it.
To elaborate, the solar energy hitting earth is about 1,000 W per square meter near the equator near noon. The total per capita energy consumption in the US is roughly 10,000W. That means that the energy hitting the Mediterranean Sea (or clouds above it) in a single hour in early afternoon is roughly equivalent to the total annual energy needs of about 250 billion people at US per capita energy usage. And The Mediterranean is only about half of one percent of the planet's surface area.
Peter F. Hamilton had a sci-fi scenario where that was a real problem. In the Greg Mandel books I believe. We invented cheap fusion, and build so many fusion reactors that the added heat creates insane hurricanes all over the planet (if I remember correctly)
But yeah, I think it'd take an unbelievable amount of heat production to change the atmosphere directly. But the thing is the sun does bombard us with a mind-blowing amount of heat energy every day, so that's why changing the amount that's trapped by the atmosphere by a very tiny amount can have devastating consequences.
As an aside, I found this article the be spectacularly well written:
> A central argument for fossil fuels’ continued dominance is that humanity will surpass 10 billion at some point, and all those people will want something like the Western living standards built over the past 100 years on the back of coal, gas, and oil. Yet what a poverty of imagination this betrays, especially in light of climate change, which hits the poorest hardest. How can that be the pinnacle of civilization? What even constitutes “higher living standards” in a world where the costs of our existing technologies are so transparent? Far from securing hydrocarbon dominance for another 100 years, the needs and aspirations of future generations demand it give way to something more sustainable.
I almost have goosebumps reading that passage. People's demand for (and right to) high living standards is truly a significant issue, but it's often framed in a way that derails anti-fossil fuel arguments. This reframes that, however, and offers a relevant critique of what "high living standards" is often assumed to imply.
When I go by the numbers it looks like there is easily room for enough renewable energy generation for everyone to consume energy services at "Western" rates. But a number of caveats:
Energy production is the easier part. Storage is the harder part. It seems like renewable electricity storage is just now getting to the point of maturity that solar electricity production was 10-15 years ago. [1]
The model Westerner in question is someone more like the median Dane than the median Texan. [2]
Some forms of consumption are going to be limited by constraints other than CO2 emissions from energy. Ruminants emit too much methane for everyone to eat beef like Australians. There are not enough redwood trees for the world's populations to install redwood hot tubs like Californians used to. There is not enough usable space in Luzon for most of the population to have a large detached house even if there were clean energy for all those houses.
In the cited statistics, they may be conflating energy production/refining with consumption. In Europe, the Benelux region has much higher consumption then their neighbors. A bit surprising given similar weather, their love for bicycles and well developed train infrastructure. State side, Louisiana has a much higher consumption than rest of the deep South. Perhaps due to the small population and the oil & gas production off of the carcinogenic coast?
Louisiana has a large number of facilities that make chemicals and fuels from natural gas and crude oil. Those facilities dissipate much of the primary energy in the inputs in the course of making refined output products. I think that's where the high per capita figure comes from; it's e.g. energy losses in facilities making ethylene from fossil inputs, not the mere fact of extracting fossil fuels. Since that energy dissipation happens in facilities located within the state of Louisiana, staffed by Louisianans, I think it's fair to include those facilities in the per-capita statistics for Louisiana.
The other popular perspective is that those figures really "belong" more to the end consumer than to the producer. I don't agree, for reasons both philosophical and pragmatic.
Pragmatic: it is easier to track what happens in large production facilities than to track the ultimate retail fate of every gallon of gasoline coming from Louisiana refineries. Trying to trace production to millions of consumers instead of monitoring dozens of primary producers is a recipe for getting much less actionable data.
Philosophical: producers are (IMO) more responsible for the efficiency/pollution of production than consumers are. A consumer has no way of telling at the point of sale how efficiently/cleanly the aluminum in a laptop or plastic in a bucket was produced. Primary producers reap the profits and make those process choices about production; it's also producers who should most face the criticism for wasteful or polluting practices.
The problem I have is that the statement "everyone will have the same living standards as a someone in the Texas" leaves out half the picture. If everyone has that living standard then everyone will be as productive as someone living in Texas.
Do you mean to imply that productivity increases when your standard of living does? I'd agree with that (for a definition of productive that isn't so narrowly defined as production of wealth for a private entity like a company.)
If not, we need to deal with the fact that "productivity" doesn't directly correlate with your standard of living, unless your definition of the word is just the rate at which you accumulate capital.
The same applies to the seas on which fossil fuels are shipped across the world. In June, Trump unleashed a tweeted torpedo at the Carter Doctrine when he questioned the U.S. Navy’s role in ensuring freedom of navigation, especially for oil tankers.
Followed by:
Absent the U.S. Navy policing sea lanes, it’s debatable whether oil-importing countries would have allowed themselves to rely on barrels shipped from the Middle East and other hot spots.
It does seem strategically questionable when posed this way.
Perhaps the poorest have an incentive then to quickly burn fossil fuels to become not poor then. Perhaps that is what is China doing and what India should do.
From my seat, the Western World brought us to this brink and isn't doing enough right now.
Renewables are rapidly approaching cost parity. In energy generation, they have arguably already achieved it, even with existing(!) coal(!) power.
And China is actually investing far more into clean energy than richer countries, both in absolute as well as relative terms. One of the reasons is the catastrophic pollution from manufacturing. Others are fuel independence and the goal of becoming a leading manufacturer.
Something I don't see acknowledged in discussions like these, is that industrial energy usage isn't something that is distributed equally, and never will be, and never should be, because some industries use more or less, and people and geographic areas specialize.
If you are going to run an aluminum smelter, you need a lot of power. An area where they don't have those, doesn't need anywhere near the amount of power per capita. But somebody has to produce aluminum if society is going to have it.
That's why certificate/trading schemes are important: they allow all the costs of emissions to be levied onto the goods produced, making the (financial) costs of production, and therefore consumption, align with the environmental costs.
That's better compared to, say, per-country emission goals.
And the thing that's going to save us boiling frogs, if it's not too late already, is the invisible hand of the free market. Fossil fuels are rapidly getting out-priced by renewables, which are getting order-of-magnitude improvements in cost.
I'd hardly say that the free market is the savior, The innovation in renewables was the result of heavy government spending in R&D grants to universities, subsidies on renewable tech, and cap and trade on emissions. Lets hope that the free market can take the baton after government intervention pushed down the initial price barriers.
You aren't looking it through the lens of "all business good/all government bad" enough.
When in reality the picture is "somethings the market does well, some things absolutely should not have a profit motive - the picture is complex" which frankly these days wouldn't fit on the side of a bus so no-one this side of the pond would pay any attention.
and conversely, continued hydrocarbon dominance was the result of heavy government subsidy for the industry. It's truly impossible to know if renewables would have happened faster or slower in a free market.
A free market could've done all of this faster and more efficiently if governments were capable to commensurately price externalities like climate change.
They clearly aren't, so this whole prediction that hydrocarbons are on their way out will turn out false. Any serious amount of political unrest brings gas subsidies out of the political toolbox. Even if climate change happens exactly as predicted, it will not stop hydrocarbon use. If anything, a downtrend in living standards will cause even more hydrocarbon use, as it is cheaper and more primitive technology.
Mostly nonsense. The improvements we've seen over the past decade have been improvements in manufacturing and other process, not subsidy. It truly is cheaper now, and will get cheaper still. The free market has had the baton for the past decade, at least. The main impediment is mostly the time scale of power plant projects, and the cost of intermediate storage (which has also plummeted).
And of course, this doesn't take into account our direct and indirect subsidies to the fossil fuel industry - you know, like what we spend on a military presence in the Middle East.
Tesla has more than doubled in size every year since it was founded. It has grown faster than Amazon did. That's not subsidy, because subsidy is bound politically and could not keep up with that sort of growth. No, that's what being the best-bet winner for a trillion dollar market looks like.
We did get lucky. It was not at all clear that solar panels could get cheap and have long useful lives. Or that battery technology, which barely moved for a century, would get much better. Or even that large numbers of huge windmills would be cost-effective.
We got unlucky in that nuclear power turned out to be much more troublesome than expected. Breeder reactors were a dud. Fusion didn't work out.
I suspect there is no such thing as an ungamed "free market." The phrase reminds me of apologists that talk about "communism done right, in theory," in response to condemnation of communism as practiced.
We rank and file are just resources for those who game whatever system we find ourselves in.
As Peter Thiel pointed out, in the idealized frictionless free market of politicians and economists, profits are driven to zero. The market is only profitable when there is friction.
>Despite the falling costs and growing market share of renewable energies, they still lack the killer app: a price on carbon emissions that would expose the frequently hidden costs of fossil fuels. Conventional wisdom holds that Americans, especially, wouldn’t stand for that.
This is why I desperately want a carbon tax above all else. Price in the externalities, to accelerate existing trends in the energy replacement cycle.
I don’t think government can magic a solution into existence (thought basic r snd d funding helps), but it is well within government power to price externalities. We can even lower other taxes that have negative effects but are currently needed for revenue.
We may or may not make it, but such a tax will help speed all of our efforts by growing the reward for non-carbon energy.
I may be naive, but I think the real problem here isn't Americans per se, but American corporations; once an industry in the states is large enough, taxing it (in any meaningful way) is virtually impossible because of lobbying dollars and backdoor dealings with politicians (e.g. "regulators," lol). Look at sugar, plastic, corn, beef, etc. There are examples a plenty.
We're in a world where some auto companies are doing a deal with California for higher efficiency standards, rather than going along with the administration's attempts to lower them. So, I wouldn't assume that all or even most American corporations would fight a carbon tax. It seems like more of a partisan ideological thing?
A bit of both. Corporations can’t lobby for open murder or human sacrifice: they have to hew to popular opinion, as politicians do.
PR and propaganda can sway this somewhat, but not in a limitless way. The single biggest factor blocking more urgent action is human nature: we tend to the short term, we like to be comfortable, and we have a hard time imagining things being radically different than they are.
I am not saying it’s impossible to convince the populace. I only mean to counter the perception that resistance comes only or even largely from corporations.
Iirc correctly americans only have a 10-15% spread on climate issues compared to europeans.
Even if you try to reduce your own carbon impact, getting all those calculations right can be tricky. Taxing it makes more carbon-intensive things more expensive, and makes it easier to do something natural: just go with cheaper options.
Crucially, this also applies to all the people who wouldn't go to the effort of trying to lower their impact.
Sorry but this is wishful thinking to say the least.
Oil, coal and gas not only are cheap, reliable, plentiful and versatile materials we have learned to turn into an excellent source for transportation, they are also used for many other things we take for granted. Probably 80% of the stuff we surround ourselves with is made of oil-based products some way or another.
I happen to be involved with a group that is trying to find alternatives to ex. plastic but it's simply not even close to looking like we have useful alternative let alone for the multitude of usages plastic can be used for.
For energy, we are even further of. This is a physics problem it's not like there were just a bunch of easy solutions waiting for someone to pick them up. Oil won for a number of reasons.
What most people forget is that it's not like oil somehow dominated simply because it was being promoted by some evil conglomerate, oil dominated and still dominates because of the many different ways we can utilize it to make our live better, safer, easier, richer more plentiful etc.
Furthermore things like this:
"> A central argument for fossil fuels’ continued dominance is that humanity will surpass 10 billion at some point, and all those people will want something like the Western living standards built over the past 100 years on the back of coal, gas, and oil. Yet what a poverty of imagination this betrays, especially in light of climate change, which hits the poorest hardest. How can that be the pinnacle of civilization? What even constitutes “higher living standards” in a world where the costs of our existing technologies are so transparent? Far from securing hydrocarbon dominance for another 100 years, the needs and aspirations of future generations demand it give way to something more sustainable."
Is especially missing the point.
Nature didn't give us a safe and friendly environment we made unsafely, it gave us a hostile and unfriendly environment that we through the use of ex fossil fuels have made safe.
The poor nations will only be hardest affected if they don't have access to cheap and plentiful energy which is what the environmental movement seems to be pushing for.
I don't think that's done on purpose but the result is that poor nations will be more dependent on rich nations if we don't allow them to gain propserity.
I know that this is heresy on HN but it needs to be said.
It seems reasonable to me that the transition to renewables will make energy even cheaper, and absolutely less dependent on international markets (like the little problem that 40% of internationally exchanged oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz). So it's almost certainly a good thing for poorer nations.
Contrast this with the ever-popular HN push for nuclear power. Many nations lack the infrastructure to support such a complex and expensive endeavor, and some frankly can't be trusted with it. So a nuclear future is far, far worse than a renewable future.
Oil won for good reasons a hundred years ago. And it's going to lose for good reasons over the next hundred years.
What renewables can both give us plastic, pesticides, concrete?
What renewables can deliver cheap, reliable, scalable energy anywhere needed?
The most popular forms of renewables like wind and solar are not even close to being stable, reliable or cheap, furthermore they only deliver electricity which is what? 20% of the total energy needs?
Nuclear is expensive because of the regulations not because of technology and more people die from wind and solar than from nuclear.
Having been involved in investing in this space it's pretty obvious that we aren't even close to having alternatives, as in not even in a couple of decades.
You take away the Chinese investment in renewables and the rest of the world's investment in renewables are falling not rising and even with the Chinese investments it's stalling.
There is such an insane amount of groupthink going on here that I know people aren't going to actually accept it but it's very easy to get a reality check simply by taking $10K and find a company which you trust will succeed after you do due diligence. You will quickly find out that we are kind of at the forefront of energy and alternatives where we are and that means less than 1% of the worlds global energy consumption (not just electricity) is wind and solar.
A far cry from what you will hear german and danish politicians claim.
Ok, you're just wrong on some of this stuff. When I say "renewable", I mean wind and solar for the most part, so keep that in mind.
No, renewables don't solve the plastic/pesticides/concrete problem. It's energy, not hardware.
Renewables can and do deliver cheap, reliable, scalable energy. The automobile is a really good example of that, and electric cars are quickly edging out internal combustion. I imagine we're no more than two decades from total electric car base. There is such a thing as batteries, you know.
Wind and solar are only delivering x% of our power now, but time moves, and they are growing exponentially. Their lower cost provides a strong financial incentive to do all new construction in renewables. So again, over the next few decades, we will transition to a mostly-renewable grid.
Nuclear is expensive because it's hard, not because of "regulation". And considering the track record of the industry and the consequences of failure, I'm all for the regulation. If regulation was the problem, we'd see more nuclear in nations with very little environmental regulation and strong central governments, like Russia and China. But they still only get a small fraction of their power from nuclear, and it's about to be outstripped by renewables. Because renewable is much cheaper.
I wouldn't invest in the industry because a: speculating on individual companies is just gambling (an industry fund would be different), and b: the cost of energy is going to go down, so profit margins won't be great. It'll wipe out the fossil energy industry, but the end result will be the world spending less money for more energy. Bad investment, good for humanity.
>Renewables can and do deliver cheap, reliable, scalable energy. The automobile is a really good example of that, and electric cars are quickly edging out internal combustion. I imagine we're no more than two decades from total electric car base. There is such a thing as batteries, you know.
The electric cars are still made, transported, maintained, and powered by fossil fuels and nuclear.
Renewables at the moment (and for the foreseeable future) can't handle changing the world's fleet (?), or even 20% of it, to electric cars...
Renewables are to projected to be around 16%-18% in 2040:
"Should progress continue at the pace currently forecast, the share of renewables in final energy consumption would be roughly 18% by 2040"
Yes, electric car manufacturing is still done largely with non-renewable sources. But it's happening nonetheless. Manufacturers like Porsche and Volvo expect to be over 50% EV by 2025. Even for fuel-based cars, plug-in hybrids are becoming more common. So the auto industry will be switching quickly.
Unfortunately, we will still have other pockets where fossil fuels are much harder to root out - heavy oil for shipping, jet fuel, and the existing base of coal plants that aren't financially viable to replace. But how many decades are left in those coal plants? Who will build a new coal plant to replace the old one?
And as gasoline and coal are phased out, they will become more expensive, as economies of scale drop out. Meanwhile, economies of scale in manufacturing are a key reason for the drop in the cost of renewables. Market forces are mostly on the side of renewables here, and trends even more so.
"expecting" is the problem word here. That means absolutely nothing. Its marketing talk with no real foundation in reality.
Gasoline and coal will be phased out but it's not because of wind and solar as they literally can't deliver what is needed and will need at a minimum nuclear or oil or coal as backup when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining.
We are nowhere near fuel cells. One could even make a case for us being closer to fusion than fuel cells.
"When the sun isn't shining" shows that you really don't understand the field. Again... ever heard of batteries? There are any number of ways to temporarily store power. Collect wind/solar when the wind blows and the sun shines, and have some spare energy cached when demand exceeds supply.
There's no "can't" anywhere in this. It's just a question of cost. And if wind/solar + sufficient storage is still cheaper than coal and gas peaker plants, it wins. That's the way the entire industry is betting, worldwide. The experts whose careers are on the line think this is the right path for a reason.
I understand the field perfectly well, well enough to know a thing or two about capacity factors.
It's not a question of cost but of simple physics.
Batteries aren't going to solve anything what so ever. We would need fuel cells which is theoretically possible but as far out as fusion when it comes to actually have something that works in practice.
Solar and wind aren't projected to be more than around 3%-4% in 2040 there is nothing exponential about that at all.
They cant compete and have made energy more expensive in ex. germany and Denmark where it's being subsidized by the taxpayer any look at an invoice from the energy supplier makes that painfully clear.
The fact that renewables can't solve those things makes it less attractive because with oil you get those extra uttilitizes so when you extract the cost is divided on those different areas. Thats just hard to compete with. So yes the other renewables aren't hardware, thats just one of their problems.
No nuclear isn't hard, it was at times almost as cheap as coal back when it was less regulated.
Renewables aren't cheap they are expensive which you would see once you started investing in it and which is why almost no one do. Keep in mind this isn't some product market fit problem. If we could do fuel-cells it would be a pretty safe bet so there isn't really much excuse when investing in energy which is exactly my point. It's pretty hard to find alternatives, not hard to find one that works if it existed.
Pesticides: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...
Targeting pest species rather than indiscriminate killing. Stamets is also doing successful research into keeping conventional pesticides from killing off bees with mycelium extracts.
Concrete: https://interestingengineering.com/future-construction-mushr...
Similar to the pesticides, not a drop-in replacement but an alternative technique with some overlap of useful properties. Also we’ve had a few thousand years to experiment with concrete, mychotech is maybe a decade or two old.
These aren’t the same renewables that we would use to make energy, but they are renewable alternatives to stuff we use petro or its byproducts for today. And they grow on our waste, reusing more energy than we do now.
>It seems reasonable to me that the transition to renewables will make energy even cheaper
The transition to renewables will be more like holographic storage, month-long batteries, strong AI, and flying cars -- perpetually in the future, and with small scale, still mainly fossil-backed, wins touted as breakthroughs...
I thought it was a pretty simple argument though. We won't abandon hydrocarbon sources anytime soon because there aren't any alternatives no matter what gets written in articles from people who want to abolish it.
The article is about renewables becoming cheaper and more competitive with hydrocarbons as we speak. Even in the absence of a carbon tax to pay back for its huge externalities. Do you have some evidence the fall in prices of ie solar will not happen even though it’s trending that way? That would be more interesting than your blanket statement.
I am at work but the whole article is very interesting and completely focused on other things other than what you mentioned - basically failed policies to encourage private investment have caused lower and lower investment. The article then goes on to suggest new alternative policies.
So far, but it's looking likely that continuing to consume them will render large swathes of our planet uninhabitable. A pretty significant externality!
What are you talking about? Oil makes the environment cleaner not dirtier. Do you know how many wells are naturally polluted by nature? How uninhabitable large parts of the world would be if it wasn't for the use of fossil fuels? You rather live like we used to? Like animals? What are you willing to give up?
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We've had to warn you about this before. Accounts that propagate flamewars repeatedly, we eventually have to ban. I don't want to have to ban you, so please stop doing this.
It's pretty short-sighted to point to latest market trends and infer that the hydrocarbon fuels are on their way out and renewables are there to replace them.
Yes, fossil fuels are down. Commodities are down. Companies benefiting from government spending are up, and government spending is at record highs. Not only that, pretty much any asset that you would expect to outperform in a bull market is way up.
No surprises there, this is a decade-old bull market fueled by trillions of worldwide cheap debt and quantitative easing. Yet, despite a supposedly roaring economy, the money-machine that is supposed to be "for emergency use only" just keeps on running. It's been working so well that "more spending" is the only valid political platform for both parties.
The central issue, is that fossil fuels are a commodity, and solar and wind are technologies. Both, of course, have physical components (coal, sand, metal, etc.), and both involve technological progress (fracking is a particularly important example), but the long-term trend of commodities is, at best, up and down and up and down, whereas the long-term trend of technologies is down.
This means that, because both solar and wind electricity have prices that decline at an exponential rate (different from Moore's Law in the %/year, but not in their shape), the fact that they are competitive now, means that they will be far, far cheaper in the future. No matter how much of a head start you give a linear process over an exponential one, eventually the exponential one wins. Commodity prices are worse than linear; they are more similar to sinusoidal.
The real issue now, which is not widely discussed, is how to prepare the world for a time, within a decade, when every fossil-fuel dependent economy goes the way of Venezuela. I don't think we are remotely ready to handle the fallout from that.
This idea that technology improves exponentially ad infinitum is bogus. Nothing in nature can grow exponentially in the long run. There are plenty of technologies that have almost plateaued, passenger airplanes for instance.
In the past, people envisioned an era of free electricity because surely nuclear energy would improve exponentially. It did not. Neither will renewables.
Sure, and Moore's Law for semiconductor transistors didn't last forever, either. But, it lasted from the mid-20th century well into the 21st, over several orders of magnitude reduction in cost.
The current exponential decline in the cost/kWh of solar and wind generated electricity is not as steep, but it is exponential, and it has been going on for decades. If it continues for even one more decade (and that seems quite likely, as the amount of R&D going into it is increasing), then it will drive all fossil fuels off the market. I don't think we're ready for that.
> Primary energy consumption grows at about 1% to 2% a year, and that rate has trended downward, more or less, since the 1960s. That’s linear growth
How come? Even "just" 1% per year growth in consumption is still exponential: starting with consuming 100 of something this year, in 70 years you'll consume 200 per year, but after the next 70 years you'll consume 400 per year.
During the first 70 years you would have totally consumed 10000 of that something, and during the next 70 years 20000 of that total. In the next 70 years, 40000 of that etc.
For 2% growth, each doubling takes just 36 years.
More details, quoting Al Bartlett's "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" here:
It's so disconcerting to watch organizations and architects like Arup and Bjarke Ingels support stuff like this. From an artistic perspective it's less interesting than Jeff Koons' proposed animated replica steam locomotive dangling vertically from a crane (https://www.thedailybeast.com/whatever-happened-to-jeff-koon...) and from an engineering perspective it's silly. Koons' loco could have held itself together without any feats of calculation but this is in the category of artist's fantasy made real by extensive structural analysis (and quite probably extensive interior reinforcement, not to mention a huge (floating?) foundation below the waterline.)
Arup was paid tens of millions of public money by the London "garden bridge" promoters. It's now expected to see their name on unusual large scale spectacular engineering projects. But their organizational ethos is loudly advertised as being altruistic and responsible: https://www.arup.com/perspectives/publications/speeches-and-.... It just comes across as smug and sanctimonious, given the way Arup will apparently implement almost anything with a large enough price tag attached. They really aren't a more evolved form of consultancy, even if they claim that they are.
I think it looks rather spectacular, and have no idea why "[...] an artist's fantasy made real by extensive structural analysis" is anything negative.
If I were to define the perfect consultancy it would be pretty close to "do really strange stuff that gets people thinking about important problems and get paid well for it".
And FWIW, I believe they are proposing to build it on land, not have it floating in water.
(I've had to create another account to reply as I'm doing my best to leave HN permanently. Part of this involves forgetting passwords as quickly as possible.)
You admit that you have "no idea" what I'm talking about when I complain that this is an artist's fantasy that can only be realized by recourse to massive engineering resources. So it would have been nice if, instead of dismissing what I was saying, you acknowledged the possibility that I have a legitimate position on this, e.g. by asking for clarification.
If you research Thomas Heatherwick, the Garden Bridge, and Dustin Yellin, you will find that Heatherwick is widely derided as a pied piper figure or a "billionaire whisperer". His special talent lies in convincing the wealthy that his expensive and impractical design ideas are worth implementing. The Vessel at Hudson Yard is a recent example of a lame but mega-expensive Heatherwick project.
The real point I'm trying to make here is that almost any project can be realized if enough money is thrown at it. Being an artist is not necessarily about having dreams and then raising tens of millions of dollars to make them into reality. Economy of means is an important part of all creative activity, and Heatherwick in particular doesn't get it. It's the old story of any fool being able to do something for a dollar, but only an engineer being able to do it for fifty cents. This applies to artists just as much, and it applies to the bang-for-the-buck they get when making work.
Heatherwick is a good example of a designer who presides over bloated, unclever vanity projects. Arup cheerfully accept millions of pounds to actually bring his ideas somewhere near becoming reality. To take a built example: Arup engineered the museum Heatherwick designed in South Africa which includes a large atrium carved out of a preexisting set of concrete grain silos. You can read here
https://www.arup.com/-/media/arup/files/publications/t/arup-... about the very extensive trickery necessary to make this happen.
This Yellin proposal has all the hallmarks of that same process—an impractical and unnecessary megalomaniacal creative gesture that only becomes possible with a lot of engineering ingenuity and capital. The hard work is done by the engineers, and of course they are delighted to be paid to be involved in something so prestigious. They don't realize or just don't care that it's bullshit by any measure of artistic value. That is the frustrating smugness and foolishness that I am complaining about. This kind of project is a blue-chip "boutique engineering" gravy train for Arup and similar organizations, and the projects have zero positive impact on the world while at the same time rubbing everyone's noses in the mediocre concepts of overrated designers like Heatherwick and Yellin. It is grotesque, it has everything to do with vanity, greed and wealth and nothing to do with stimulating important conversations or improving quality of life.
You can find out all about Yellin online, and make up your own mind whether he's a real artist with an important and thought-provoking message, or just a hyperactive self-promoter. (He's well connected in certain circles but not taken seriously as an artist by the art world any more than Banksy is.)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadSource: https://www.co2levels.org/
edit: fixed increase ratio from 1800 to now.
(That isn't to say that 420 ppm isn't really bad.)
That's what CO2 does. It is a greenhouse gas, meaning it traps heat that would otherwise have escaped into space.
> Or if we want to preserve it on earth, a way to turn heat back into hydrocarbon?
It is literally impossible to turn heat, by itself, into anything useful. That's the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and it's a cruel mistress.
It's nice to think about alternative solutions to these problems, but you need to have at least a basic understanding of basic level physics if you want to discuss this sort of thing.
The only basic pieces of information you need to understand climate change are:
1) The greenhouse effect exists. That is, when you have something like glass, it will let energy in in the form of light, but it won't let as much energy escape once it's converted to heat. This concept can be grasped by anyone who has walked into a car that has been parked out in the sun. And by the massive clue in the name, that is the existence of greenhouses.
2) Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas. That is, it acts like glass does in a greenhouse. This is harder to believe from first principles, but it's not that hard to believe. For me the clinching explanation (again, as a kid) was learning Venus was hotter than Mercury. And there is no reason to believe folks are lying about this, and I don't believe anyone is even contesting this.
3) Understanding how fossil fuels came into existence (basically, organic material trapped over centuries in the ground. again, the clue is in the name) and understanding the CO2 lifecycle, and how burning fossil fuels adds material to the CO2 lifecycle that was not there earlier. This isn't something that can be determined easily by a kid from 1st principles, but it's something that no one is really contesting either.
Once you accept these 3 fairly straightforward basic physics phenomena, global warming is inevitable.
The only questions are whether the release of CO2 is significant enough to have an impact, where we have to rely on measurements and scientists. But seeing that there was a fairly standard progression in how deniers would first deny global warming was ever happening, then deny that it was anthropogenic, then claim it wouldnt have as negative an impact, and now claim that well, it's too late...let's look at mitigation; I was able to filter them out when they were at step 1 itself.
Aside: I also want to point out the horrific misunderstanding people have about the terms "global warming" and "climate change" which are fairly self descriptive, but apparently is a nefarious effort to "hide the spike". Global Warming (i.e., more energy in the earth's ecosystem due to the greenhouse effect) leads to Climate Change (that is, changes in our climate behavior).
One is a cause, and the other is the effect. Both are valid and orthogonal concepts, and not some sort of conspiracy.
Adds material to the CO2 lifecycle that was not there earlier? Isn't it just rereleasing CO2 that was in the atmosphere earlier?
I don't know the facts here, but I'm pretty sure carbon can slowly be added from other sources. So sure, that CO2 might have been in the atmosphere before, but then we added more CO2 as well.
The point being, the CO2 we're digging up wasn't in our atmosphere before. The atmosphere that we and all the animal and plants have been adapted too. Sure, there's a time when the CO2 concentration (and even O2) was wildly different. But then there were other animals living on earth, that was adapted to those conditions. Slow change is fine, rapid change is disastrous.
Yes, and the Arctic was once tropical.
Humans, and much of the life we see around us, evolved in the subsequent periods of higher oxygen and depleted CO2. As we reverse that effect, we return the atmosphere nearer to how it once was - when humans and such weren't around. The planet and its life will be fine. Us and the multiple species on which we depend may well not be.
By burning it we are releasing carbon that has been stored for millennia and accumulated over millennia. It's introduced as though it were new into our carbon cycle.
That's a pragmatic position, not a denier's position. I'm very progressive but I realized long ago we were never going to get anywhere with the 'everyone reduce' strategy. We should have started looking at mitigation options decades ago.
For example water vapor contributes far more to warming than CO2. The calculations are all about CO2 increasing temperatures, increasing water evaporation, which then increases heat trapping.
If all it was was a simple first order "how much warming does co2, and co2 alone" produce, then there wouldn't be the arguing there is now.
Another important aspect is that "average temperature" conceals change, by virtue of being an average. The average of (10, 10, 11, 13) is 11, but so is the average of (5, 7, 15, 17).
Carbon dioxide blocks a narrow spectrum of radiation. It acts a lot like food coloring dye mixed in water. If you mix in a couple of drops, the change is dramatic, but if you double it and mix in a couple more, the change is much less so.
If the only effect on the atmosphere was the CO2 greenhouse effect, and we added 10x the CO2 the average global temperature would only rise a couple of degrees.
The issue and the controversy that surrounds CO2 is how the Earth will respond to this added heat that it can't get rid of. If it's a tipping point, and will end up in a death spiral of factors compounding upon each other (ex. the permafrost melts and changes the albedo of the earth and that causes more warming, etc.) is where the science of climate change actually is.
The problem is that climate is complicated and no one can predict exactly how it will behave. This is why there are ton of models and it seems no one can agree upon how much the effect will be.
Climate skeptics will argue this is because the science done so far is mostly conjecture and very weak, and the conspiratorial among them will say that only studies that support climate change are being published/funded, so there is a lot of bias to make out that their evidence is stronger than it is. There has also been a lot of modifications to historical temperature readings, (this seems to be with good justification), but I personally can't judge.
Whether the effect of CO2 is going to be large or small is outside of both of our grasps, and we really have to trust on others to make that determination, unless you're willing to really learn the science behind it.
However, your list of reasons are just muddying the situation even further. They are easily debunked and if you proclaim them, and people find out they don't hold muster, you may drive people further into the climate change skeptic camp, which I don't think you really are trying to do.
That's not quite true/relevant.
Matter can be turned into energy, energy can be turned into matter, theoretically at least. More practically a Stirling engine or peltier will turn heat into electricity, and filament bulbs did a good enough job of turning heat into light.
Plus you can still cheat the 2nd law locally. I can heat my house in winter for example, it isn't just a slow uniform slide to the heat death of the universe.
It’s actually extremely true and relevant.
> Matter can be turned into energy, energy can be turned into matter, theoretically at least.
None of these conversions are 100% efficient. The second law effectively puts limits on the efficiency of heat engines[1] that depend on the difference between “hot” and “cold” in the engine. At low temperature differences, the theoretical efficiency is extremely poor[2] and the practical efficiency is even worse.
Peltiers are not exempt from this either.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_engine#Efficiency
Yes, you can bring in other things, like an outside system or additional useable energy, but that only disproves the misquoted version of my statement.
I'm sure when you talk to people like that it makes you feel really good and secure about your own beliefs and like you're on The Winning Team, but being a dick like this to someone who is asking a question makes everything more divisive and worse. If you like arguments and preserving your own sense of intellectual superiority over others, congratulations on perpetuating more of the same stagnation. If you're interested in anything productive, sorry, but you done goofed.
Theoretically the limit to the number of people we could support on earth with unlimited energy (eg cheap fusion) is not limited by space or food or water (the later solved by energy) but by simple thermodynamics. We'd cook ourselves if there were too many of us. Note this happens at many orders of magnitude more population than we currently have.
An innocent-seeming 5% growth turns in to four orders of magnitude if it continues for two centuries.
Urban heat bubbles are real.
People have done the math on the heat directly released by burning fossil fuels, and it isn't that high.
What CO2 does is keep more of the SUN'S heat on Earth. And that turns out to be a much more important contribution to the temperature of the Earth than the heat directly released by burning fossil fuels.
Current CO2 levels are a full 50% higher than they were 80 years ago or so, and that makes a big, big difference.
https://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf
The star's output is so significant that even the tiniest change in how that energy is absorbed and retained has large effects on the little planet.
So we find ourselves where we are.
But yeah, I think it'd take an unbelievable amount of heat production to change the atmosphere directly. But the thing is the sun does bombard us with a mind-blowing amount of heat energy every day, so that's why changing the amount that's trapped by the atmosphere by a very tiny amount can have devastating consequences.
> A central argument for fossil fuels’ continued dominance is that humanity will surpass 10 billion at some point, and all those people will want something like the Western living standards built over the past 100 years on the back of coal, gas, and oil. Yet what a poverty of imagination this betrays, especially in light of climate change, which hits the poorest hardest. How can that be the pinnacle of civilization? What even constitutes “higher living standards” in a world where the costs of our existing technologies are so transparent? Far from securing hydrocarbon dominance for another 100 years, the needs and aspirations of future generations demand it give way to something more sustainable.
That's because it's framed deliberately by bad-faith energy-industrial proponents, and repeated by "useful innocents".
Energy production is the easier part. Storage is the harder part. It seems like renewable electricity storage is just now getting to the point of maturity that solar electricity production was 10-15 years ago. [1]
The model Westerner in question is someone more like the median Dane than the median Texan. [2]
Some forms of consumption are going to be limited by constraints other than CO2 emissions from energy. Ruminants emit too much methane for everyone to eat beef like Australians. There are not enough redwood trees for the world's populations to install redwood hot tubs like Californians used to. There is not enough usable space in Luzon for most of the population to have a large detached house even if there were clean energy for all those houses.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20595698
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... https://www.eia.gov/state/rankings/
And on the subject of energy storage: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the-...
The other popular perspective is that those figures really "belong" more to the end consumer than to the producer. I don't agree, for reasons both philosophical and pragmatic.
Pragmatic: it is easier to track what happens in large production facilities than to track the ultimate retail fate of every gallon of gasoline coming from Louisiana refineries. Trying to trace production to millions of consumers instead of monitoring dozens of primary producers is a recipe for getting much less actionable data.
Philosophical: producers are (IMO) more responsible for the efficiency/pollution of production than consumers are. A consumer has no way of telling at the point of sale how efficiently/cleanly the aluminum in a laptop or plastic in a bucket was produced. Primary producers reap the profits and make those process choices about production; it's also producers who should most face the criticism for wasteful or polluting practices.
I don't think people appreciate what that means.
Do you mean to imply that productivity increases when your standard of living does? I'd agree with that (for a definition of productive that isn't so narrowly defined as production of wealth for a private entity like a company.)
If not, we need to deal with the fact that "productivity" doesn't directly correlate with your standard of living, unless your definition of the word is just the rate at which you accumulate capital.
The same applies to the seas on which fossil fuels are shipped across the world. In June, Trump unleashed a tweeted torpedo at the Carter Doctrine when he questioned the U.S. Navy’s role in ensuring freedom of navigation, especially for oil tankers.
Followed by:
Absent the U.S. Navy policing sea lanes, it’s debatable whether oil-importing countries would have allowed themselves to rely on barrels shipped from the Middle East and other hot spots.
It does seem strategically questionable when posed this way.
From my seat, the Western World brought us to this brink and isn't doing enough right now.
And China is actually investing far more into clean energy than richer countries, both in absolute as well as relative terms. One of the reasons is the catastrophic pollution from manufacturing. Others are fuel independence and the goal of becoming a leading manufacturer.
If you are going to run an aluminum smelter, you need a lot of power. An area where they don't have those, doesn't need anywhere near the amount of power per capita. But somebody has to produce aluminum if society is going to have it.
That's better compared to, say, per-country emission goals.
We got lucky.
When in reality the picture is "somethings the market does well, some things absolutely should not have a profit motive - the picture is complex" which frankly these days wouldn't fit on the side of a bus so no-one this side of the pond would pay any attention.
They clearly aren't, so this whole prediction that hydrocarbons are on their way out will turn out false. Any serious amount of political unrest brings gas subsidies out of the political toolbox. Even if climate change happens exactly as predicted, it will not stop hydrocarbon use. If anything, a downtrend in living standards will cause even more hydrocarbon use, as it is cheaper and more primitive technology.
And of course, this doesn't take into account our direct and indirect subsidies to the fossil fuel industry - you know, like what we spend on a military presence in the Middle East.
Citation needed. Even a market darling like Tesla benefited greatly from government subsidies on “green” technologies.
We got unlucky in that nuclear power turned out to be much more troublesome than expected. Breeder reactors were a dud. Fusion didn't work out.
We rank and file are just resources for those who game whatever system we find ourselves in.
This is why I desperately want a carbon tax above all else. Price in the externalities, to accelerate existing trends in the energy replacement cycle.
I don’t think government can magic a solution into existence (thought basic r snd d funding helps), but it is well within government power to price externalities. We can even lower other taxes that have negative effects but are currently needed for revenue.
We may or may not make it, but such a tax will help speed all of our efforts by growing the reward for non-carbon energy.
PR and propaganda can sway this somewhat, but not in a limitless way. The single biggest factor blocking more urgent action is human nature: we tend to the short term, we like to be comfortable, and we have a hard time imagining things being radically different than they are.
I am not saying it’s impossible to convince the populace. I only mean to counter the perception that resistance comes only or even largely from corporations.
Iirc correctly americans only have a 10-15% spread on climate issues compared to europeans.
Even if you try to reduce your own carbon impact, getting all those calculations right can be tricky. Taxing it makes more carbon-intensive things more expensive, and makes it easier to do something natural: just go with cheaper options.
Crucially, this also applies to all the people who wouldn't go to the effort of trying to lower their impact.
Oil, coal and gas not only are cheap, reliable, plentiful and versatile materials we have learned to turn into an excellent source for transportation, they are also used for many other things we take for granted. Probably 80% of the stuff we surround ourselves with is made of oil-based products some way or another.
I happen to be involved with a group that is trying to find alternatives to ex. plastic but it's simply not even close to looking like we have useful alternative let alone for the multitude of usages plastic can be used for.
For energy, we are even further of. This is a physics problem it's not like there were just a bunch of easy solutions waiting for someone to pick them up. Oil won for a number of reasons.
What most people forget is that it's not like oil somehow dominated simply because it was being promoted by some evil conglomerate, oil dominated and still dominates because of the many different ways we can utilize it to make our live better, safer, easier, richer more plentiful etc.
Furthermore things like this:
"> A central argument for fossil fuels’ continued dominance is that humanity will surpass 10 billion at some point, and all those people will want something like the Western living standards built over the past 100 years on the back of coal, gas, and oil. Yet what a poverty of imagination this betrays, especially in light of climate change, which hits the poorest hardest. How can that be the pinnacle of civilization? What even constitutes “higher living standards” in a world where the costs of our existing technologies are so transparent? Far from securing hydrocarbon dominance for another 100 years, the needs and aspirations of future generations demand it give way to something more sustainable."
Is especially missing the point.
Nature didn't give us a safe and friendly environment we made unsafely, it gave us a hostile and unfriendly environment that we through the use of ex fossil fuels have made safe.
The poor nations will only be hardest affected if they don't have access to cheap and plentiful energy which is what the environmental movement seems to be pushing for.
I don't think that's done on purpose but the result is that poor nations will be more dependent on rich nations if we don't allow them to gain propserity.
I know that this is heresy on HN but it needs to be said.
Contrast this with the ever-popular HN push for nuclear power. Many nations lack the infrastructure to support such a complex and expensive endeavor, and some frankly can't be trusted with it. So a nuclear future is far, far worse than a renewable future.
Oil won for good reasons a hundred years ago. And it's going to lose for good reasons over the next hundred years.
What renewables can both give us plastic, pesticides, concrete?
What renewables can deliver cheap, reliable, scalable energy anywhere needed?
The most popular forms of renewables like wind and solar are not even close to being stable, reliable or cheap, furthermore they only deliver electricity which is what? 20% of the total energy needs?
Nuclear is expensive because of the regulations not because of technology and more people die from wind and solar than from nuclear.
Having been involved in investing in this space it's pretty obvious that we aren't even close to having alternatives, as in not even in a couple of decades.
You take away the Chinese investment in renewables and the rest of the world's investment in renewables are falling not rising and even with the Chinese investments it's stalling.
There is such an insane amount of groupthink going on here that I know people aren't going to actually accept it but it's very easy to get a reality check simply by taking $10K and find a company which you trust will succeed after you do due diligence. You will quickly find out that we are kind of at the forefront of energy and alternatives where we are and that means less than 1% of the worlds global energy consumption (not just electricity) is wind and solar.
A far cry from what you will hear german and danish politicians claim.
No, renewables don't solve the plastic/pesticides/concrete problem. It's energy, not hardware.
Renewables can and do deliver cheap, reliable, scalable energy. The automobile is a really good example of that, and electric cars are quickly edging out internal combustion. I imagine we're no more than two decades from total electric car base. There is such a thing as batteries, you know.
Wind and solar are only delivering x% of our power now, but time moves, and they are growing exponentially. Their lower cost provides a strong financial incentive to do all new construction in renewables. So again, over the next few decades, we will transition to a mostly-renewable grid.
Nuclear is expensive because it's hard, not because of "regulation". And considering the track record of the industry and the consequences of failure, I'm all for the regulation. If regulation was the problem, we'd see more nuclear in nations with very little environmental regulation and strong central governments, like Russia and China. But they still only get a small fraction of their power from nuclear, and it's about to be outstripped by renewables. Because renewable is much cheaper.
I wouldn't invest in the industry because a: speculating on individual companies is just gambling (an industry fund would be different), and b: the cost of energy is going to go down, so profit margins won't be great. It'll wipe out the fossil energy industry, but the end result will be the world spending less money for more energy. Bad investment, good for humanity.
The electric cars are still made, transported, maintained, and powered by fossil fuels and nuclear.
Renewables at the moment (and for the foreseeable future) can't handle changing the world's fleet (?), or even 20% of it, to electric cars...
Renewables are to projected to be around 16%-18% in 2040:
"Should progress continue at the pace currently forecast, the share of renewables in final energy consumption would be roughly 18% by 2040"
https://www.iea.org/renewables2018/
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/United_S...
Unfortunately, we will still have other pockets where fossil fuels are much harder to root out - heavy oil for shipping, jet fuel, and the existing base of coal plants that aren't financially viable to replace. But how many decades are left in those coal plants? Who will build a new coal plant to replace the old one?
And as gasoline and coal are phased out, they will become more expensive, as economies of scale drop out. Meanwhile, economies of scale in manufacturing are a key reason for the drop in the cost of renewables. Market forces are mostly on the side of renewables here, and trends even more so.
Gasoline and coal will be phased out but it's not because of wind and solar as they literally can't deliver what is needed and will need at a minimum nuclear or oil or coal as backup when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining.
We are nowhere near fuel cells. One could even make a case for us being closer to fusion than fuel cells.
There's no "can't" anywhere in this. It's just a question of cost. And if wind/solar + sufficient storage is still cheaper than coal and gas peaker plants, it wins. That's the way the entire industry is betting, worldwide. The experts whose careers are on the line think this is the right path for a reason.
It's not a question of cost but of simple physics.
Batteries aren't going to solve anything what so ever. We would need fuel cells which is theoretically possible but as far out as fusion when it comes to actually have something that works in practice.
Solar and wind aren't projected to be more than around 3%-4% in 2040 there is nothing exponential about that at all.
They cant compete and have made energy more expensive in ex. germany and Denmark where it's being subsidized by the taxpayer any look at an invoice from the energy supplier makes that painfully clear.
The fact that renewables can't solve those things makes it less attractive because with oil you get those extra uttilitizes so when you extract the cost is divided on those different areas. Thats just hard to compete with. So yes the other renewables aren't hardware, thats just one of their problems.
No nuclear isn't hard, it was at times almost as cheap as coal back when it was less regulated.
Renewables aren't cheap they are expensive which you would see once you started investing in it and which is why almost no one do. Keep in mind this isn't some product market fit problem. If we could do fuel-cells it would be a pretty safe bet so there isn't really much excuse when investing in energy which is exactly my point. It's pretty hard to find alternatives, not hard to find one that works if it existed.
https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR3eH1AFcRSPSEit8JINLCMvE_...
Mushrooms!
Plastic: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/mushrooms-n... https://daily.jstor.org/company-uses-mushrooms-grows-plastic... Probably not for long-lived plastics, but a horrific amount is single-use. And there’s research into using something similar for medical devices, which may mean longer-term is an option; I’m not sure.
Pesticides: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc... Targeting pest species rather than indiscriminate killing. Stamets is also doing successful research into keeping conventional pesticides from killing off bees with mycelium extracts.
Concrete: https://interestingengineering.com/future-construction-mushr... Similar to the pesticides, not a drop-in replacement but an alternative technique with some overlap of useful properties. Also we’ve had a few thousand years to experiment with concrete, mychotech is maybe a decade or two old.
These aren’t the same renewables that we would use to make energy, but they are renewable alternatives to stuff we use petro or its byproducts for today. And they grow on our waste, reusing more energy than we do now.
The transition to renewables will be more like holographic storage, month-long batteries, strong AI, and flying cars -- perpetually in the future, and with small scale, still mainly fossil-backed, wins touted as breakthroughs...
This is from speed reading.
Reply?
That's what the article talks about and that the reality. You can look for other sources which will tell you the same.
Investments in wind and solar despite the hype isn't exploding it's stagnating and even dropping.
Is it cheap? Is it only cheap because we subsidize the externalities they impose?
Is it plentiful? It is a finite resource, whereas wind, solar are not.
> it gave us a hostile and unfriendly environment that we through the use of ex fossil fuels have made safe.
How safe is our environment if it is destroyed or otherwise rendered uninhabitable by the consumption/burning of the very same fossil fuels?
When you factor in the positive externalities I think it's safe to say it's pretty cheap yes.
It's a finite resource but we get better and better at utilizing it and keep finding new areas.
It doesn't have to be infinite it just has to allow us to develop new forms of resources.
"How safe is our environment if it is destroyed or otherwise rendered uninhabitable by the consumption/burning of the very same fossil fuels?"
It's not rendered uninhabitable. In fact, it allows us to live places that used to be uninhabitable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes, fossil fuels are down. Commodities are down. Companies benefiting from government spending are up, and government spending is at record highs. Not only that, pretty much any asset that you would expect to outperform in a bull market is way up.
No surprises there, this is a decade-old bull market fueled by trillions of worldwide cheap debt and quantitative easing. Yet, despite a supposedly roaring economy, the money-machine that is supposed to be "for emergency use only" just keeps on running. It's been working so well that "more spending" is the only valid political platform for both parties.
What could possibly go wrong?
This means that, because both solar and wind electricity have prices that decline at an exponential rate (different from Moore's Law in the %/year, but not in their shape), the fact that they are competitive now, means that they will be far, far cheaper in the future. No matter how much of a head start you give a linear process over an exponential one, eventually the exponential one wins. Commodity prices are worse than linear; they are more similar to sinusoidal.
The real issue now, which is not widely discussed, is how to prepare the world for a time, within a decade, when every fossil-fuel dependent economy goes the way of Venezuela. I don't think we are remotely ready to handle the fallout from that.
In the past, people envisioned an era of free electricity because surely nuclear energy would improve exponentially. It did not. Neither will renewables.
The current exponential decline in the cost/kWh of solar and wind generated electricity is not as steep, but it is exponential, and it has been going on for decades. If it continues for even one more decade (and that seems quite likely, as the amount of R&D going into it is increasing), then it will drive all fossil fuels off the market. I don't think we're ready for that.
How come? Even "just" 1% per year growth in consumption is still exponential: starting with consuming 100 of something this year, in 70 years you'll consume 200 per year, but after the next 70 years you'll consume 400 per year.
During the first 70 years you would have totally consumed 10000 of that something, and during the next 70 years 20000 of that total. In the next 70 years, 40000 of that etc.
For 2% growth, each doubling takes just 36 years.
More details, quoting Al Bartlett's "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20552490
all-in cost of solar power has dropped 85% since 2010, and BloombergNEF forecasts an additional 63% drop through 2050.
Arup was paid tens of millions of public money by the London "garden bridge" promoters. It's now expected to see their name on unusual large scale spectacular engineering projects. But their organizational ethos is loudly advertised as being altruistic and responsible: https://www.arup.com/perspectives/publications/speeches-and-.... It just comes across as smug and sanctimonious, given the way Arup will apparently implement almost anything with a large enough price tag attached. They really aren't a more evolved form of consultancy, even if they claim that they are.
If I were to define the perfect consultancy it would be pretty close to "do really strange stuff that gets people thinking about important problems and get paid well for it".
And FWIW, I believe they are proposing to build it on land, not have it floating in water.
You admit that you have "no idea" what I'm talking about when I complain that this is an artist's fantasy that can only be realized by recourse to massive engineering resources. So it would have been nice if, instead of dismissing what I was saying, you acknowledged the possibility that I have a legitimate position on this, e.g. by asking for clarification.
If you research Thomas Heatherwick, the Garden Bridge, and Dustin Yellin, you will find that Heatherwick is widely derided as a pied piper figure or a "billionaire whisperer". His special talent lies in convincing the wealthy that his expensive and impractical design ideas are worth implementing. The Vessel at Hudson Yard is a recent example of a lame but mega-expensive Heatherwick project.
The real point I'm trying to make here is that almost any project can be realized if enough money is thrown at it. Being an artist is not necessarily about having dreams and then raising tens of millions of dollars to make them into reality. Economy of means is an important part of all creative activity, and Heatherwick in particular doesn't get it. It's the old story of any fool being able to do something for a dollar, but only an engineer being able to do it for fifty cents. This applies to artists just as much, and it applies to the bang-for-the-buck they get when making work.
Heatherwick is a good example of a designer who presides over bloated, unclever vanity projects. Arup cheerfully accept millions of pounds to actually bring his ideas somewhere near becoming reality. To take a built example: Arup engineered the museum Heatherwick designed in South Africa which includes a large atrium carved out of a preexisting set of concrete grain silos. You can read here https://www.arup.com/-/media/arup/files/publications/t/arup-... about the very extensive trickery necessary to make this happen.
This Yellin proposal has all the hallmarks of that same process—an impractical and unnecessary megalomaniacal creative gesture that only becomes possible with a lot of engineering ingenuity and capital. The hard work is done by the engineers, and of course they are delighted to be paid to be involved in something so prestigious. They don't realize or just don't care that it's bullshit by any measure of artistic value. That is the frustrating smugness and foolishness that I am complaining about. This kind of project is a blue-chip "boutique engineering" gravy train for Arup and similar organizations, and the projects have zero positive impact on the world while at the same time rubbing everyone's noses in the mediocre concepts of overrated designers like Heatherwick and Yellin. It is grotesque, it has everything to do with vanity, greed and wealth and nothing to do with stimulating important conversations or improving quality of life.
You can find out all about Yellin online, and make up your own mind whether he's a real artist with an important and thought-provoking message, or just a hyperactive self-promoter. (He's well connected in certain circles but not taken seriously as an artist by the art world any more than Banksy is.)