There is a chart in there that says that 33% of municipal buses are already electrified. I cannot believe it. Did China secretly electrify its whole fleet?
> This is exactly what happened in China which is home to 98 percent of the world's electric buses. More than 500,000 have been introduced to Chinese streets in a coordinated effort by the Chinese government, while very few are in operation in other countries.
So there are only about 1.5M buses in operation world-wide? Germany operates around 80k. If that is somewhat representative for the EU as a whole, and I have no reason to doubt it, there should be around 400-500k buses here alone. This would leave only 500k buses for the rest of the world, which I find hard to believe.
On the other hand it might not be off by some orders of magnitude...
From my experience, a lot of buses in Africa and East Asia are run by private companies or individuals, not municipalities. So the number could very well be correct.
The key is probably the word "municipal". Most of the UK for example has public buses, but they are not run by local authorities - only the ones in London are.
> China alone responsible for 80 percent of global annual installations between 2019 and 2020.
This will be the opening sentence in the history books describing the decline of the western powers. US & EU really need to get their act together if they want to remain relevant.
Can this really be solved? If "China" decides to take action, it can do so without opposition, with billions of dollars, with megaprojects that span thousands of kilometers, even. Their huge high-speed rail is another example.
Can the US do that? Or even the EU? It will cost more, it will take longer, and it will be smaller. This is, IMHO, why China tops all of the charts lately. The democratic, federal west simply cannot compete on scale.
But it's not just a government choice, it's a choice of whole echelons of society. There are plenty of people who still get paid if the megaproject fails. We've seen a lot of that in the COVID response; pretty much every minister has been accused of routing hundreds of millions to their mates for items that were never delivered.
(To me, the unique thing about WW2 was that it forced the UK out of complacency and into employing diverse talent as a matter of raw necessity, because suddenly it was no longer possible to buy your way out of it as an individual. Suddenly the establishment would let a woman fix the Spitfires, a gay man break the codes, and nobody complained about all the Poles coming over here defending our country.)
Paradoxically, the UK made it harder to build on-shore wind turbines, resulting in the UK having the largest offshore wind capacity in the world. Calling the UK "the Saudi Arabia of wind" is perhaps a bit silly, but it's an interesting example of how regulatory actions can't be examined in isolation.
Renewable energy is exceptionally popular and it's getting so cheap that money is hardly an issue any more.
The biggest roadblock is opposition from industries that profit from the past energy system. This combined with listening too much to vocal opposition to renewables, which is usually loud, but a minority (local exceptions exist).
The west can do it but we're hamstrung by a system of privatized taxes that makes everything cost two to three times more than it should.
Privatized taxes as in when the government needs to buy land for something it has to pay inflated prices inside a ginormous real estate bubble. Labor is expensive because laborers have to pay 50% of their wages as rents.
> The democratic, federal west simply cannot compete
And this is why western nations should not allow China unilateral trade freedoms until it's government addresses the human rights of its own citizens. To do so, imperils the progress human rights (esp. workers' rights) within western nations. While China's ability to marshal it's resources in awe-inspiring, I'm certain no average worker/citizen in the west wants their freedoms to go retrograde... until it's too late and it's the only way to get a job.
"While China lifted an unprecedented amount of people out of poverty and can acomplish things that we were once able to accomplish but now have become unthinkable, and the west encounters collapse of birth rates, trillions in new dept and thus inflation of assets like housing, takeover of education, academia and Big Corp by woke zealots, and transformation of High Trust into Low Trust societies due to unchecked immigration and lax law enforcement, somehow China should follow the west's lead."
I'm not sure there's a coherent argument here for me to follow. But the centre of my argument is: if you can't open criticize a government, you have little recourse if it decides to put your interests last in the name of, say, moving some economic lever that profits people in wealth and power. The western world has funnelled much of its money into a China, and this has given China the economic resources to uplift its own citizens out of poverty. What it hasn't given them is the right to criticize the government, or workers' rights that much of the western world takes for granted (Foxconn being an example of one of the better workplaces).
If you live in the west, and you like your lifestyle, you ought to be worried about what's coming, and for the US, regression of workers' rights in the name of being globally competitive is already in full swing. If you had the option of being able to challenge your government in a democracy, or a centrally managed autocracy that might throw you in jail, which do you choose?
There is a contradiction in your argument, thought I'd point it out:
> if you can't open criticize a government, you have little recourse if it decides to put your interests last in the name of, say, moving some economic lever that profits people in wealth and power
> The western world has funnelled much of its money into a China, and this has given China the economic resources to uplift its own citizens out of poverty
We had "liberal democracy" in the last decades. This has lead to the outcome of outsourcing most of western manufacturing to China and handing them our trade secrets, because that was the game-theoretic optimum of the ideology of free trade, equality and universalism.
If liberal democracy means putting the people's interest first, why have the policies of the last 30 years actively worked against the interests of the average american employee, and benefitted mostly capital? Once you take the question serious, you will find some interesting hypotheses, some of which will be hard to empirically argue against. I will not go into those.
Note that this is not an endorsement of Chinese-style autocratism, but meant to challenge preconceived notions on what the current state of affairs is actually like.
I detest state overreach, centralism and the absence of liberty, and therefore I would detest Chinese-style government. But standing where we are, right now, it takes a lot of chuzpah to claim that our system is working as intended, meaning it is effective, just, leads to prosperity and has the interest of its people in mind.
I'd posit that much of the back sliding of social outcomes for western citizens is that their nations now have to compete with places like China that were once 'developing', but are now technologically advanced, and they can also permit factories to use their populations as slaves.
The US and even other countries like Australia, UK, France etc. are willingly voting in governments that dismantle social policies and workers' rights for 'more jobs'. Without protectionist policies, there's no way to reconcile the increased labour costs in western nations, let alone personal liberties. If China is permitted to ascend without improving the rights of its people, that's the country we will have to match.
This is the optimistic view, meaning that once those countries that have a large number of competitive middle-class strivers have caught up, the pressure will subside, and some things will come back.
There is another angle to this, which is that China won't have to fight the red tape, regulation, NIMBYism, being stuck in local maxima and the general lack of vision, optimistic outlook on the future and belief in the system working that has befallen western countries. All we do is to pump ever more money into the markets and go deeper into debt. At one point, this will stop working. Some say this is already happening: is inflation real, or not?
That view is very optimistic. History has shown that power isn't willingly ceded by any government, it takes action from the bottom up. Maybe this will happen in China, but it seems the government has been pro-active in quashing uprisings, and has already laid the technological framework to maintain its police state.
China needs it's version of Chernobyl before people would be ready to risk their lives to change the government, the problem is that the new failure modes have global impact. And as we've seen with the spread of Covid, China has actually gained political capital from its mistakes, at least domestically, and also harmed the political situation of it's western competitors. Perhaps China will now wait long by the river while the rest of the world cannibalizes itself.
I can't speak for the EU, but frankly I think that ship has long since sailed here in the US. Our country is so far up its own ass it can see the back of its teeth. My estimation is that meaningful change will only come in the form of total collapse.
A little off topic. When I need and google for it Statista very often pop up and won't let me see the data. Like stock photo sites with image search. Not a fan.
But who would put it into context how much faster it needs to happen? The quickest numbers I found are that total renewables energy production is about 7000TWh/year. Whereas global primary energy consumption is 160,000TWh/year. So a lot more needs to happen a lot faster.
The 200-300GW of capacity should translate to 200-600TWh/year of generated energy. That's a 5-10% growth of yearly generated renewable energy. If we can keep it at 5% yoy, it will take 112 years to replace that total energy consumption. At 10% it would take about 60 years.
I don't think it would be smart to bet on a linear-only growth. If course, a 100+ year exponential growth might be too optimistic. But I think we did not see the end of the hocky stick so far.
We also need to consider that we're talking about a global infrastructure project, so timescales of centuries are to be expected. Whoever thinks we could replace our global energy consumption completely within a couple of decades needs to reconsider.
Naturally. The thing here is that renewable energy can be very cheap. So we might see a stark increase in energy usage in the next decades fueled entirely by abundant renewable energy. The question then is whether this will accelerate the overall switch to renewables or not. It could be that oil and gas will become much cheaper due to price pressure or much more expensive because their infrastructure doesn't pay off anymore.
Within some minimum bounds of course, we couldn't do it in a day even if everyone on the planet was aligned. But more in general, this type of statement is entirely useless. World peace is also entirely up to humans but despite pretty much every country and every major religion proclaiming they want peace ASAP, it still hasn't happened.
I have never seen a more stupid straw-man argument. Where did I say "don't even try"?
Energy generation is a huge industry. Emphasis on industry. And no wishful thinking from some climate-justice-hardliners will change that. There are literally the lives of billions of human beings depending on the availability of useful energy. Engineering and hard science has brought us to the point of cheap, renewable energy. Now we have to build up that capacity, but that takes time.
Your statement reads like a Maoist decree, putting ideological wants over practical realities. You read like you wish for hard, radical measures (that, of course, will only hurt the "class enemy") while you cannot be bothered with the details of how a solar panel or a wind turbine even works, let alone how it is produced and installed at scale.
So let me put that straight for you: It is not entirely up to humans to decide how long decarbonization takes. This is NOT some capitalist conspiracy. Building factories takes time and there is a limit of how many PV factories and offshore wind plants we can build today. Especially, when you want to do it in some environmentally friendly manner. We can of course accelerate the buildup for the next decade, and I would bet money on the fact that we already do exactly that.
Take into account that in some applications, you're not replacing like with like.
Thermodynamic efficiencies mean that you need to have 2-3x less primary energy to get the same amount of final energy when your primary energy is already electric generation.
The UK went from 2% to 42% electrical generation from renewable sources (not including nuclear) and almost half of that increase happened between 2015 and 2020. That's only electricity, of course, but a good chunk of transportation is going to come off of fossil fuels in the next 10 years as well.
Most likely transitions will take a logistic curve, slow ramp-up, followed by a fast phase, followed by a slowing as the hardest problems are tackled.
Are you sure? Transport alone consumes around 40% of oil output. Replacing even a chunk of that with electric vehicles will cause electric demand to skyrocket. You'll be able to power around three to four times as many cars with the same amount of energy but primary energy is absolutely relevant because that energy is currently coming from oil.
>Heat pump use one third or less of the energy to heat up water or air vs burning fossil fuels.
Are you sure? My Furnace is 95% efficient and burns natural gas. My water heater is 75% efficient and also burns natural gas. Both devices are middle of the road and much more efficient options are available.
Thermodynamically speaking this is an accounting trick, much like counting the cost of opening a curtain as an alternative to the energy cost of a lightbulb. But it’s a useful measure for consumers.
I don't know how old you are, but the sad fact is that the tipping point was basically in the '80s and '90s, when most people reading this were not even teenagers. The world as a whole woke up to the problem when it was effectively already too late, because the scientific method wants proof and proof can only come after the process runs. There is absolutely no point in reasoning in terms of guilt and apologies.
Edit: some commenters seem to think I'm trying to blame scientists. I'm trying not to blame anyone, because things just take time and that's what it is. What I'm trying to say is that reasoning in terms of guilt is pointless and counterproductive, because it just antagonises people.
Not sure that we can blame the eggheads for this one. The "Limits to Growth" report was published in 1972. I remember people talking about it in my teens (80s). At some point, everyone has to take their individual responsibility and accept that the scientific community did it's job, and that it's not their job to make society move. That's on all of us.
Moreover, it sure does seem like we have passed a tipping point. Whether it is the tipping point remains to be seen.
From a societal point of view, I think it is not a good idea to communicate "we're too late to fix anything" as it seems clear that this will lead to a total abandonment of any effort.
The best moment to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best moment is "now".
> 2. At some point in time the younger generation will revolt against their 'climate change denying governments' and just vote them out.
I wish. Unfortunately this is not how change happens. Women got voting rights not because men suddenly voted their sexists governments out. Women got their voting rights because they fought for it. The only thing that gives me any kind of hope is movements like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion. If they don't succeed, we're all doomed.
You’re right to say that’s not how change happens, but in this case I wouldn’t expect protest groups to be effective either, not even if the protests involved people throwing themselves in front of the private sports cars and aircraft of modern aristocrats — the harm from CO2 is equal regardless of where on the planet it is emitted, and there are plenty of places where the emissions can move to if banned in the rich countries.
More optimistically, I also don’t think such protest actions are necessary.
Renewables are now cheaper than everything else in good conditions, and still cheaper than coal and the equal of oil when you have to add batteries to them. And both the batteries and the power supplies themselves look like they’re going to continue to get cheaper for a while yet.
I’m still concerned about biodiversity, antibiotics, and phosphorous — just not CO2.
Interestingly, this demand is being felt in terms of increased prices of solar panels. Solar modules are currently trading at 15-20% higher (relative to end of last year) due to high demand and raw material shortage. This is further exacerbated by shipping and container issues. The long term downward price pressure has been incredibly helpful but we need more capacity and raw material for the downward price pressure to continue relative to increase in demand.
(Source - from our own procurement at www.de.energy)
I would love to see another metric. How much of their money entrenched interests (coal-plants,nuclear, grid-provider) had to invest into holding back solar. One could compute the point of collapse from that.
53 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadSo there are only about 1.5M buses in operation world-wide? Germany operates around 80k. If that is somewhat representative for the EU as a whole, and I have no reason to doubt it, there should be around 400-500k buses here alone. This would leave only 500k buses for the rest of the world, which I find hard to believe.
On the other hand it might not be off by some orders of magnitude...
This will be the opening sentence in the history books describing the decline of the western powers. US & EU really need to get their act together if they want to remain relevant.
Can the US do that? Or even the EU? It will cost more, it will take longer, and it will be smaller. This is, IMHO, why China tops all of the charts lately. The democratic, federal west simply cannot compete on scale.
There is opposition but where is it when $$$ are poured into unnecessary wars? When the taxes are increased? When scam happens?
It is, fundamentally, a choice. The UK has been cutting off megaproject funding since the APT (and before): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Passenger_Train
But it's not just a government choice, it's a choice of whole echelons of society. There are plenty of people who still get paid if the megaproject fails. We've seen a lot of that in the COVID response; pretty much every minister has been accused of routing hundreds of millions to their mates for items that were never delivered.
(To me, the unique thing about WW2 was that it forced the UK out of complacency and into employing diverse talent as a matter of raw necessity, because suddenly it was no longer possible to buy your way out of it as an individual. Suddenly the establishment would let a woman fix the Spitfires, a gay man break the codes, and nobody complained about all the Poles coming over here defending our country.)
This is very much a deliberate decision.
I'm all for more offshore wind, but onshore wind will have to play an important role for future energy.
The biggest roadblock is opposition from industries that profit from the past energy system. This combined with listening too much to vocal opposition to renewables, which is usually loud, but a minority (local exceptions exist).
Privatized taxes as in when the government needs to buy land for something it has to pay inflated prices inside a ginormous real estate bubble. Labor is expensive because laborers have to pay 50% of their wages as rents.
And this is why western nations should not allow China unilateral trade freedoms until it's government addresses the human rights of its own citizens. To do so, imperils the progress human rights (esp. workers' rights) within western nations. While China's ability to marshal it's resources in awe-inspiring, I'm certain no average worker/citizen in the west wants their freedoms to go retrograde... until it's too late and it's the only way to get a job.
If you live in the west, and you like your lifestyle, you ought to be worried about what's coming, and for the US, regression of workers' rights in the name of being globally competitive is already in full swing. If you had the option of being able to challenge your government in a democracy, or a centrally managed autocracy that might throw you in jail, which do you choose?
> if you can't open criticize a government, you have little recourse if it decides to put your interests last in the name of, say, moving some economic lever that profits people in wealth and power
> The western world has funnelled much of its money into a China, and this has given China the economic resources to uplift its own citizens out of poverty
We had "liberal democracy" in the last decades. This has lead to the outcome of outsourcing most of western manufacturing to China and handing them our trade secrets, because that was the game-theoretic optimum of the ideology of free trade, equality and universalism.
If liberal democracy means putting the people's interest first, why have the policies of the last 30 years actively worked against the interests of the average american employee, and benefitted mostly capital? Once you take the question serious, you will find some interesting hypotheses, some of which will be hard to empirically argue against. I will not go into those.
Note that this is not an endorsement of Chinese-style autocratism, but meant to challenge preconceived notions on what the current state of affairs is actually like.
I detest state overreach, centralism and the absence of liberty, and therefore I would detest Chinese-style government. But standing where we are, right now, it takes a lot of chuzpah to claim that our system is working as intended, meaning it is effective, just, leads to prosperity and has the interest of its people in mind.
The US and even other countries like Australia, UK, France etc. are willingly voting in governments that dismantle social policies and workers' rights for 'more jobs'. Without protectionist policies, there's no way to reconcile the increased labour costs in western nations, let alone personal liberties. If China is permitted to ascend without improving the rights of its people, that's the country we will have to match.
There is another angle to this, which is that China won't have to fight the red tape, regulation, NIMBYism, being stuck in local maxima and the general lack of vision, optimistic outlook on the future and belief in the system working that has befallen western countries. All we do is to pump ever more money into the markets and go deeper into debt. At one point, this will stop working. Some say this is already happening: is inflation real, or not?
China needs it's version of Chernobyl before people would be ready to risk their lives to change the government, the problem is that the new failure modes have global impact. And as we've seen with the spread of Covid, China has actually gained political capital from its mistakes, at least domestically, and also harmed the political situation of it's western competitors. Perhaps China will now wait long by the river while the rest of the world cannibalizes itself.
US HAS decided to lose leadership on ecology. HAS decided to underfund fusion and renewables research.
China's installed coal generation in 2020 is bigger than the rest of the world combined.
https://www.statista.com/chart/24544/world-electricity-gener...
This is simple math, China is NOT replacing carbon sources with renewable or nuclear. They are stacking them.
China is planning to open more coal plants in 2030 than the total coal plants that will be closed down in the rest of the world at this date.
The 200-300GW of capacity should translate to 200-600TWh/year of generated energy. That's a 5-10% growth of yearly generated renewable energy. If we can keep it at 5% yoy, it will take 112 years to replace that total energy consumption. At 10% it would take about 60 years.
I don't think it would be smart to bet on a linear-only growth. If course, a 100+ year exponential growth might be too optimistic. But I think we did not see the end of the hocky stick so far.
We also need to consider that we're talking about a global infrastructure project, so timescales of centuries are to be expected. Whoever thinks we could replace our global energy consumption completely within a couple of decades needs to reconsider.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth104/sites/www.e-educati...
It will take a long time because it will take a long time! So don’t even try!
No - it is entirely up to humans to decide how long it takes.
Energy generation is a huge industry. Emphasis on industry. And no wishful thinking from some climate-justice-hardliners will change that. There are literally the lives of billions of human beings depending on the availability of useful energy. Engineering and hard science has brought us to the point of cheap, renewable energy. Now we have to build up that capacity, but that takes time.
Your statement reads like a Maoist decree, putting ideological wants over practical realities. You read like you wish for hard, radical measures (that, of course, will only hurt the "class enemy") while you cannot be bothered with the details of how a solar panel or a wind turbine even works, let alone how it is produced and installed at scale.
So let me put that straight for you: It is not entirely up to humans to decide how long decarbonization takes. This is NOT some capitalist conspiracy. Building factories takes time and there is a limit of how many PV factories and offshore wind plants we can build today. Especially, when you want to do it in some environmentally friendly manner. We can of course accelerate the buildup for the next decade, and I would bet money on the fact that we already do exactly that.
Thermodynamic efficiencies mean that you need to have 2-3x less primary energy to get the same amount of final energy when your primary energy is already electric generation.
The UK went from 2% to 42% electrical generation from renewable sources (not including nuclear) and almost half of that increase happened between 2015 and 2020. That's only electricity, of course, but a good chunk of transportation is going to come off of fossil fuels in the next 10 years as well.
Most likely transitions will take a logistic curve, slow ramp-up, followed by a fast phase, followed by a slowing as the hardest problems are tackled.
What matters is the useful part and not the wasted part (released as mostly unwanted heat) in the transition to renewable.
For example electric cars uses one quarter of the energy of a fossil car for the same service (moving around).
Heat pump use one third or less of the energy to heat up water or air vs burning fossil fuels.
Etc...
Are you sure? Transport alone consumes around 40% of oil output. Replacing even a chunk of that with electric vehicles will cause electric demand to skyrocket. You'll be able to power around three to four times as many cars with the same amount of energy but primary energy is absolutely relevant because that energy is currently coming from oil.
>Heat pump use one third or less of the energy to heat up water or air vs burning fossil fuels.
Are you sure? My Furnace is 95% efficient and burns natural gas. My water heater is 75% efficient and also burns natural gas. Both devices are middle of the road and much more efficient options are available.
Even more than that, since charging EVs usually happens at night. And it's pretty easy to incentive EV users to do that.
Thermodynamically speaking this is an accounting trick, much like counting the cost of opening a curtain as an alternative to the energy cost of a lightbulb. But it’s a useful measure for consumers.
1. Green energy is getting cheaper year on year and in some cases it's now cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives.
2. At some point in time the younger generation will revolt against their 'climate change denying governments' and just vote them out.
When that happens a price will be put on carbon and that will wipe out the remaining fossil fuel participants.
However, while I'm too old to worry about the effects of climate change, I still have to apologize to the younger generation.
In the next 10 years very little action will be taken on climate change and when that action finally comes, I fear it will come too late.
Even though we have had many decades of warnings we ignored all the signs.
So the sad reality is, while we had a chance to tackle the issue, we just ignored the problem and absolved our responsibility to future generations.
The reality is my generation, my older generation have let you down, only because we don't give a shit about your future.
That is both depressing and disappointing.
I'm sorry the adults, my generation, were left wanting :(
Edit: some commenters seem to think I'm trying to blame scientists. I'm trying not to blame anyone, because things just take time and that's what it is. What I'm trying to say is that reasoning in terms of guilt is pointless and counterproductive, because it just antagonises people.
Moreover, it sure does seem like we have passed a tipping point. Whether it is the tipping point remains to be seen.
From a societal point of view, I think it is not a good idea to communicate "we're too late to fix anything" as it seems clear that this will lead to a total abandonment of any effort.
The best moment to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best moment is "now".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
My sadness is the outright denial of the problem at hand.
Why I'm depressed for the future is I live in a country where for the last 15 years we've been debating if climate change is actually real.
In those missed 15 years we've seen massive environmental impacts to the country, all of which look a lot like climate change.
However, as a country and a government we remain blissfully unaware of the problems at hand.
So it will take another 10 years of denial before the reality bites, but that will have been 25 wasted years.
> There is absolutely no point in reasoning in terms of guilt and apologies.
My country and my government still don't believe the issue is real.
I'm apologizing for that 'national' ignorance.
My life will not be impacted by climate change, but those living 50 years from now will be asking what went wrong?
I wish. Unfortunately this is not how change happens. Women got voting rights not because men suddenly voted their sexists governments out. Women got their voting rights because they fought for it. The only thing that gives me any kind of hope is movements like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion. If they don't succeed, we're all doomed.
More optimistically, I also don’t think such protest actions are necessary.
Renewables are now cheaper than everything else in good conditions, and still cheaper than coal and the equal of oil when you have to add batteries to them. And both the batteries and the power supplies themselves look like they’re going to continue to get cheaper for a while yet.
I’m still concerned about biodiversity, antibiotics, and phosphorous — just not CO2.
(Source - from our own procurement at www.de.energy)