It's tricky to criticize them for that though - few experts would have predicted the precipitous price drops of solar & wind tech.
Nearly nobody in an industry that manufactures goods can foresee a way to sell the goods they make for less than ~half of what they currently sell for. Yet sometimes prices can go down by a factor of 10x or 100x or more in ways few predict.
They got it wrong multiple times though. Maybe adjust the models after you got it wrong twice? And they didn't get it wrong just a bit, their most optimistic projection got it wrong by orders of magnitude. If we look at the paper, they actually show what are more realistic projections are.
I'm not sure if malice or incompetence is really a better judgement of the work though.
But they weren't predictions were they? They were forecasts based on the current policies at the time. So basically a warning to govs that more policies were required to sustain growth...
I would say this favour renewable in some way. Spurring over investment in terms of government subsidies and taxes on fossil fuel because the uptick in renewables is not fast enough.
Growth is basically exponential because once payback times hit a certain threshold people start buying. A friend of mine is making 10/12k in sales commissions every month going door to door selling solar. This is a very lucrative business.
IEA is required to get a certain amount of its budget from data and publication sales. Not only does this make that data unavailable to the public due to price, it provides perverse incentives to slant the data to make it more saleable to those willing to pay the high price. They are catering to customers who want to use IEA products to slant discussions.
> [paraphrased] Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) shows the future assuming governments follow their published energy plans. The Announced Pledges Scenario (APS) assumes that all aspirational targets announced by governments are met on time and in full. The Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario maps out a way to limit global warming to 1.5 °C.
The 3 scenarios are wildly different... And whats worrying is that I suspect the reality probably won't even be as good as the STEPS future, because expensive environmental policies tend to be the first thing to get dropped when a country is struggling for economic growth.
If I could purchase shorts on the polar bear population, I think it would be a pretty safe bet...
>If I could purchase shorts on the polar bear population, I think it would be a pretty safe bet...
Ah yes, the polar bears. When I was in middle school we watched An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore and I wrote a well-referenced essay on how polar bears would probably be extinct by 2020, as he says in the documentary. Since then, their numbers have steadily increased [1]*
After they were over hunted, much like everything in the area in the 1800 to 1900s their numbers have rebounded due to more strict rules around hunting and the fur trade. That doesn't mean their habit is not under serious threat.
Their habit is not under serious threat, simply because it isn't. Polar bears who are used to living in temperatures between -30C and 20C or so, will not mind neither 1.5C increase in average temperature nor even twice or four times that.
They depend on ice and there’s going to be a whole lot less of it at the North Pole, entirely possible that there will be an ice free North Pole in the next two or three decades, habitat =gone.
Global average temperatures aren’t the whole story.
>Of the 19 polar bear subpopulations recognized in 2017, one was in decline, two were increasing, seven were stable, and nine had insufficient data.[48]
The other group the article references, the Polar Bear Specialist Group, sadly isn't much better than the GWPF.
Look at their most recent report, they show "Data deficient" for most subpopulations. I think the other comment is likely correct, the population is going up, but for reasons unrelated to the existence of global warming.
https://www.iucn-pbsg.org/
This doesn't fit the environmentalist narrative well, so the most prominent statistics on their homepage aren't directly related to polar bear populations, but things like "The mean rate of decline in summer sea ice area across all subpopulations "
Who's running out of energy? The Russians certainly aren't. Ukraine? They've didn't have a lot energy to begin with. Europe? Germany has vast gas reserves it could tap with fracking, it just chooses not to.
It's not at all, that's a terrible emotional analogy that's 100% ridiculous.
But since you're insinuating fracking is as bad as nuking a city... you do realize that emissions went down in the US while electricity generation rose due to nat. gas displacing coal thanks to fracking?
Were you fine with Germany outsourcing their energy to Russia, even though the production of the energy was dirtier than what Germany could have made itself?
Having worked around fracking rigs and gotten covered in fracking fluid during blowouts... and having read the MSDSs for fracking fluid... I'm not convinced the lower emissions were worth the cost in groundwater purity. And boy, do West Europeans care about their groundwater purity.
It's clear that you care about the environment so I'm just going to say that, based on my firsthand experience as a roughneck who did fracking jobs, that it's probably the most greenwashed industry in the world and even if your opinion of it is based on direct reading of official hard numbers, those numbers are gamed at every handoff between field and office. Probably at every handoff between office and press release as well, though I was never in that loop.
> Not even that but every country and it's industries that have been transitioning from coal to nat. gas are fudging the numbers to pretend it's better?
It's quite clear the numbers are fudged for methane production at every level from the field to the PR office - I honestly didn't know that was a controversial statement. You don't get data added to a report on what you don't measure, to begin with.
I'm mostly responding to you since I had similar arguments about 20 or so years ago when the transition to natural gas (and off of nuclear btw, not just coal!) was being discussed while being massively subsidized. I felt it was a foolish decision then, and still do now.
Why? Society will not act unless there is an emergency. They will then focus on a single solitary solution. If you decide natural gas is going to be built while we build out our nuclear (or other) capacity, you'll find out that 30 years later you will have a whole lot of natural gas generation and be left with no nuclear industry whatsoever and very little capability to quickly restart it. Seems that prediction is playing out.
So now we get to burn all the cheap natural gas before we finally get into a big enough of an emergency to perhaps find something somewhat sustainable long-term. We'll see what short-term solutions present themselves in the meantime, unfortunately I think those short term political solutions may lie in a mountaintop in eastern Kentucky.
So to answer your overall question - yes, I can fully believe transitioning from coal to natural gas while we effectively ignored all other energy investments (at scale) was a stupid move in a long-term environmental lense. In 100 years I think it will be obvious that if fracking had not been invented it would have been better overall for the environment. Time will tell!
That's not the whole story. The Netherlands refrains from developing its natural gas fields to their full extent and yet the damage caused by the resulting earthquakes is considerable and widespread - very much like a nuke, just over a much longer timespan:
How deciding against using an available energy source that might might help with alleviating short-term problems (nuclear power being an even more obvious and readily available option) could be considered even remotely similar to nuking a major city is beyond me.
The same applies to building new LNG terminals, drastically increasing the storage capabilities for renewable energy, and making the power grid sufficiently resilient to be able to entirely rely on renewable energy.
Those measures take years to decades to materialise to a significant degree. Still, all those measures are currently being implemented, and rightfully so.
In comparison, developing a new fracking site from a mere technical point of view takes less than a year.
That's not to say we should do one or the other or prefer fracking over renewables. However, when the alternatives are to either continue to be at the mercy of a potentially hostile power or to use less environmentally friendly energy sources (such as coal or lignite) or to accept regular power outages as a consequence, simultaneously exploring all possible better avenues (including nuclear energy, which as mentioned is still readily available right now) is pretty much a no-brainer.
2. It's very small amounts and it can be captured (and is in some instances)
3. The US reduced emissions while growing energy output thanks to nat. gas displacing coal.
We don't have to take your word for it, we can see that nat. gas energy production is cleaner than coal, because we have actual data from our transition off of coal to nat. gas.
The methane talking point is just that. It's not an actual issue, and you can see it's not from overall numbers.
If you truly cared about emissions you'd want the current best solution that drives it down. That would mean displacing coal at all cost. The current best way to do that is nat. gas and fracking.
Nuclear isn't built up as a baseline, renewables aren't ready for peak loads, and outsourcing it to someone else only shuffles it around. So... natural gas it is...
We can also see that fracking is absolutely nasty thanks to the endless amount of studies done on it, but if we cherry pick one single metric, sure...
Ditching a fossil fuel to another fossil fuel is just perpetuating the problem, it's not solving anything. It's like going from a meth addiction to a cocaine addition, sure cocaine isn't as bad, you'll still be absolutely fucked up in a decade though
> but if we cherry pick one single metric, sure...
First off, I'd say total emissions by electricity generation is a great single metric to look at.
Second, those studies you didn't even reference were most likely FUD. I've worked on companies who organized those through call centers to spread the misinformation about fracking.
But instead of coming up with useless analogies about cocaine and falling back on studies you didn't even reference, please respond to each of my points instead of talking past me.
Maybe start with the fact that there are no replacements ready for coal other than nat. gas.
I'm all for building up nuclear energy and even battery banks. But currently nothing is available other than nat. gas to take the load that coal has produced.
Soo... the best way to reduce emissions is to use nat. gas until a solution is built up and ready. (cough, nuclear, cough)
Renewables will most likely never be able to handle the peak load, you need a baseline source, that's either fossil fuels or nuclear energy thanks to their densities.
---- edit ----
@lm28469: You're still not addressing any of my points. Dropping a study and calling it a day is not a conversation. At least pick out a point to defend from it...
But here's the cool thing. We don't need to read through your biased studies!
We know nat. gas is cleaner than coal and we can see it from reduction of emissions as we transition off of coal to nat. gas.
If you want to displace nat. gas as well, support nuclear as the new baseline standard! Or come up with better battery tech!
Until then, it's not ready and we need energy so we don't die... so nat. gas it is. Or coal worst case.
> Ukraine? They've didn't have a lot energy to begin with
They're in top 30 by energy production in the world, around 50% of the energy produced being nuclear. And there untapped gas reserves as well. Coal has been disrupted since Russia invaded the east in 2014
If I'm not mistaken, nuclear capacity was to be expanded considerably in 2022 - 2023, to sell more energy to EU (specifically Poland)
Top 30 of most things doesn’t mean much since values tend to drop exponentially once you’re past the top ten or fifteen. Energy is usually used to refer to things like oil and gas, both items that Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of. Both Russia and Norway have more oil/gas than Ukraine.
Compare a map of Ukraine’s gas deposits [1] with one of Russian-occupied territory [2].
> oil and gas, both items that Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of
Ukraine has enough to rival, if not dethrone, Moscow [3]. It is accurate to say the Kremlin is burying Russians in large part to protect its energy profits.
How is a scientific consensus religion? Millions of hours of research is going into climate change every month. Satellites, tens of thousands of sensors, 30 years of academic literature, computer simulations.
Meanwhile climate change deniers are sitting on their couches pulling things out of their asses, cherry picking data from publications they didn't write, removing all context to support their argument. Posting content on Youtube, Twitter, TikTok and Substack is all these people do, either for subscribers or for conservative think tanks financed by the fossil fuel industry.
On one hand we have people denying anything is happening and on the other we have a doom cult where people people civilization is going to end because of the weather. Like people who don’t want to have children because they’re afraid of the consequences of climate change. Tell people that there’s going to be change but things are going to be mostly ok and some of them just lose their minds.
The IPCC reports don't paint a picture that things are going to be mostly okay, and those reports in many ways are conservative, because they can't include feedback loops and tipping points we are not entirely sure about.
Complicated systems tend to show only subtle signs before they rapidly collapse. AI is a new approach that might actually help us asses the risks better.
Climate change is a mine field. Telling people that we are going to be okay, while not doing anything to manage the risk is a lie. Rapid, extreme changes are coming, and they are going to test our civilization's ability to survive. Many parts of the planet will be inhabitable. And that's in a few decades, not even centuries.
Unfortunately this is out reality, like it or not. We don't get another one, so it's important what we are doing something about it. But we don't because of people like you living comfortable lies, not willing to look up.
> Many parts of the planet will be inhabitable. And that's in a few decades, not even centuries.
I don't think it's going to be a few decades. I think as you said the models are too conservatives. We are already seeing things that they didn't predict.
I don't think that's a "scientific consensus" on the end of the civilised world coming, that's what I'm talking about, that's what the narrative is.
There are countless examples of Ancient Greek cities/towns that are now several feet under the sea-level, and still, here we are, ~2500 years later and still doing our thing. The Cyrenaica and Northern Africa more generally was/were the bread-basket of the Roman Empire, they're not anymore, and yet, here we are, ~2000 years later, we've found other bread-baskets.
The civilized world now comprises of 8 billion people on a planet of depleting resources, energy crisis, pollution, and worst of all a man-made climate change that's many magnitudes faster than any before.
Good luck finding another bread-basket on an inhabitable planet with oceans having widespread oxygen-starved dead zones, a malfunctioning biological carbon pump, collapsing food web, extreme temperatures, intense droughts, diseases and conflicts.
We are seeing these happening already, and it's only going to get worst, much worst, as we reach the tipping points.
Would you not say that there's many many people that don't truly understand the intricacies of what science is and what it's become, but still follow it without asking questions?
Academically, I would assume that for the majority of people, science was something you were taught to trust growing up, being told that scientists have your best interests in mind while they spend time finding out everything about the world and coming up with reasons/theories for the way the world works and interacts with itself. The world wouldn't be anything without science, they say.
Religion is based on a set of beliefs, followings, teachings, determined and taught/shared by "qualified" individuals like priests/pastors - followers were raised from a young age to follow, internalize, and spread their faith. The world wouldn't exist without God, they said.
When you go to church (catholic in this example), you're asked/silently obligated to donate to the church when the collection plate is passed around. You're giving money, and debatably power (in form of money) to the church to keep spreading their beliefs.
I think it would be foolish to assume that there weren't rich kings/countries hundred of years ago giving money to the church to influence certain activities/actions through religious decree/law. I would also be a fool to not believe the church would influence the governments to act in certain ways based on how much power the church had had to control/influence it's followers.
Today, we have numerous examples of corporations lobbying governmental and scientific institutions to push whatever is the cause de jour. There was corn syrup lobbying in the 2010's and who knows how far back, you had the food pyramid in the 90's that heavily promoted food groups that the USDA itself was subsidizing.
There's so many outside influences, blind faith/trust, etc. etc. that I feel comfortable in todays day and age saying that society in general "trusts" science like they would "trust" a religion to keep them safe and alive, and healthy - and therefore this "trust" can be exploited to invoke fear, uncertainty, and ultimately convince people that the harm they're going through or the actions they're being forced to take, is for their own good - with the other followers chastising or guilting the others or "non-believers" into believing what _they_ think is the truth.
Do you kind of see what I'm getting at? It might seem completely odd-ball to you, but it's how a lot of people interpret and understand what's going on. Science isn't this 100% true, be-all, end-all thing because it will _always_ corrupted by governments, corporate interests, NGO influence, etc. etc. etc.
You are pretty much saying that all the world is in it, all the governments, all the independent institutions, universities, researchers, working together on a conspiracy to make the world a better, more sustainable place for no reason.
Can you not see? The changes became so rapid in the last few years that you can just go outside and see for yourself, extreme temperatures, heat domes, cold waves, wildfires, droughts, intense storms, vanishing biodiversity. Once in a hundred years events one after another. I remember my childhood when we used to have four seasons, we barely have two now, a mild winter with occasional cold waves and a summer with extreme weather. No in-between. Biggest droughts we have ever seen. A lot of insects missing.
I'm not saying they're "all in on it" in some kind of shadow-y cabal smoke and mirrors kind of conspiracy. It's not a cooperative of any kind of group, society, gathering, etc. etc. etc.
It's an absolutely giant, complex system that has enough opportunities in the works for humans - or groups of humans running corporations/NGOs/research groups - to exploit for personal profit/power/etc. meaning the end-goals are never truly achieved.
You have no recourse to your government for the decisions it makes - sure, you can vote - but your vote has such little power compared to the effort required to make meaningful decisions in society at large. Violence is out of the question legally, though the government sure likes to be violent towards its people when they want something from you.
I believe it's simply not possible for the government to simultaneously keep and grow its power and take complete care of its citizens. Governments are corporations with customers that are forced to buy products (road access, schooling, healthcare, as some examples) from them at the rate the government chooses at the service level they choose. You have no other options. Good luck with trying to change it when there's so many people all fighting amongst each other over inane things compared to this all-encompassing problem of the climate, like 'critical race theory', 'universal basic income', or 'building a wall'.
If we've already gone past the turning point as you have suggested with credible evidence, then why bother pushing so hard? We've already ruined the earth. Why not make things as comfortable as we can for the ones that are still around?
Bit of a defeatist attitude to take, but it seems like that's where it's going to inevitably if the climate scientists are right.
I don't know - I'd rather live in relative comfort because I owe nothing to the people of the future, and I wouldn't expect people in the past to owe me anything either...
This is a really childish, uncultured view. Surely even you want to be more than just an animal grazing on the field and leave a legacy behind you can be proud of. You only have this one chance to make a mark on the Universe, however small. People in the future might be looking, either through archaeology, or it's advanced version that let's them observe the past in some way, if it's possible. Who knows maybe the past is measurable from the future. Who knows the Universe maybe a collector item and aliens keep dibs on it's inhabitants. This could be all a game. Of course this is all sci-fi, but the point is that our potential is not meant to be wasted.
Theres's a slight difference between the Earth cycling between warm and cold periods on timelines that span millennia and us warming the planet by several degrees over 150 years.
What is the largest increase/decrease in global average temperature we've seen over a 100 year span since humans have existed on Earth, before the Industrial Revolution? How does that compare to the last 100 years?
"Solar PV capacity additions expand from 151 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 370 GW in 2030 and almost 600 GW in 2050, while wind capacity additions double to 210 GW in 2030 and rise to 275 GW in 2050."
Yeah, nah. Annual PV capacity production of around 400 GW in 2023 and 1 - 2 TW in 2030, based on publically announced investments. Probably more that Duckduckgo hasn't found for me. I haven't looked at wind, but given what's been in the news recently, 210 GW is low by a factor of five as well.
Looks like they're still using the same broken modelling methods, and the same broken integrated assessment model software.
Either they are wrong or they are indirectly predicting the bancruptcy of the PV industry at large. I'd bet at the former, all that additional production capacity will be used one way or another.
Module production is quite centralised, with about 80% of it in China, and another 10% or more in South-East Asian countries, set up there by Chinese companies to get around the US tariff imposed in 2019 or so. (Korea produces some of the cells but doesn't assemble modules, AFAIK. Japan, also a few cells.)
The Europeans want to re-animate their domestic manufacturing for energy security reasons, after letting it die five or six years ago. First Solar is trucking on in the USA. India has ambitions to expand its production a lot. Not too many other places, to my knowledge.
It's correct but not very useful, as it doesn't inform about the real energy output (and who cares about the nominal/theoretical output). PV in a desert in US Southwest produces vastly more energy than say PV in Germany.
It's not supposed to measure real energy output, it's about predicting the capacity increase. What the actual energy output will be is a lot harder to predict and there is a lot more uncertainty regarding those numbers. Regular power plants are denominated in the exact same way, even though the actual energy output will be lower.
The difference is around a factor of two between the US Southwest deserts and the German north sea coast [1]. So tracking installed peak capacity is not an ideal metric, but it is very simple and gets the order of magnitude right.
Real energy output is just one of many possible ways of measuring PV, but it’s even less predictable than number of panels. Fixed installations produce less power per year than 1 or 2 axis tracking etc. Different locations mean different amounts of transmission losses etc.
But even the best model is going to get blindsided by politics. Europe would have been well severed by massively investing over the summer in PV to reduce it’s dependence on Russian natural gas. They didn’t do so but I was very much expecting a push for the fastest to install alternative to natural gas turbines which is PV.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadI do wonder about their impartiality though - there are a lot of people who could stand to gain if they could influence these numbers.
TL;DR: They have been systematically getting it very wrong, always in favour of fossil fuels.
1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
Nearly nobody in an industry that manufactures goods can foresee a way to sell the goods they make for less than ~half of what they currently sell for. Yet sometimes prices can go down by a factor of 10x or 100x or more in ways few predict.
I'm not sure if malice or incompetence is really a better judgement of the work though.
https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/iea-historicall...
^ There are versions of this article that come out every year or two.
Growth is basically exponential because once payback times hit a certain threshold people start buying. A friend of mine is making 10/12k in sales commissions every month going door to door selling solar. This is a very lucrative business.
> [paraphrased] Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) shows the future assuming governments follow their published energy plans. The Announced Pledges Scenario (APS) assumes that all aspirational targets announced by governments are met on time and in full. The Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario maps out a way to limit global warming to 1.5 °C.
The 3 scenarios are wildly different... And whats worrying is that I suspect the reality probably won't even be as good as the STEPS future, because expensive environmental policies tend to be the first thing to get dropped when a country is struggling for economic growth.
If I could purchase shorts on the polar bear population, I think it would be a pretty safe bet...
Ah yes, the polar bears. When I was in middle school we watched An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore and I wrote a well-referenced essay on how polar bears would probably be extinct by 2020, as he says in the documentary. Since then, their numbers have steadily increased [1]*
https://insight.factset.com/polar-bears-bullish-or-bearish-o....
Maybe you should find a way to short Florida beach properties instead, since they should all be below water in about 10-15 years?
What would make anyone believe that they would?
Global average temperatures aren’t the whole story.
So that's where they get their numbers. And who's GWPF? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundati... Ah, yes!
https://web.archive.org/web/20151224224314/http://pbsg.npola...
You could get pretty good population estimates by just reviewing random 1 km^2 samples for bears and then extrapolating.
Look at their most recent report, they show "Data deficient" for most subpopulations. I think the other comment is likely correct, the population is going up, but for reasons unrelated to the existence of global warming. https://www.iucn-pbsg.org/
This doesn't fit the environmentalist narrative well, so the most prominent statistics on their homepage aren't directly related to polar bear populations, but things like "The mean rate of decline in summer sea ice area across all subpopulations "
It's sad that a war can driving massive change but not the insight that we are destroying the stable climate as we know it.
Are we still going to meet those energy targets if the weather escalates and destroys more and more infrastructure and harvests?
It's like saying France could easily end the war in Ukraine today, they just choose not to nuke Moscow.
But since you're insinuating fracking is as bad as nuking a city... you do realize that emissions went down in the US while electricity generation rose due to nat. gas displacing coal thanks to fracking?
Were you fine with Germany outsourcing their energy to Russia, even though the production of the energy was dirtier than what Germany could have made itself?
Shale oil deposits are usually found in harsh landscapes where not many people live.
Fracking fluid is just 90% water, 9.5% is sand, 0.5% additives. Those additives are normal cleaning products like salts, antifreeze.
Yeah you don't want to drink them but in small quantities they are fine to be in the middle of nowhere.
You'd rather have more global emissions than some small amount of pool cleaner in a remote desolate landscape?
Would you rather we burn our trash vs putting it in a landfill too? Because that's the same line of thinking.
Not even that but every country and it's industries that have been transitioning from coal to nat. gas are fudging the numbers to pretend it's better?
And you know that because you were a roughneck "who did fracking jobs", therefore you can see through these numbers.
That's quite a story, but I'll go with the breakdown of energy production by source, and the tracked emissions of energy production trends.
It's quite clear the numbers are fudged for methane production at every level from the field to the PR office - I honestly didn't know that was a controversial statement. You don't get data added to a report on what you don't measure, to begin with.
I'm mostly responding to you since I had similar arguments about 20 or so years ago when the transition to natural gas (and off of nuclear btw, not just coal!) was being discussed while being massively subsidized. I felt it was a foolish decision then, and still do now.
Why? Society will not act unless there is an emergency. They will then focus on a single solitary solution. If you decide natural gas is going to be built while we build out our nuclear (or other) capacity, you'll find out that 30 years later you will have a whole lot of natural gas generation and be left with no nuclear industry whatsoever and very little capability to quickly restart it. Seems that prediction is playing out.
So now we get to burn all the cheap natural gas before we finally get into a big enough of an emergency to perhaps find something somewhat sustainable long-term. We'll see what short-term solutions present themselves in the meantime, unfortunately I think those short term political solutions may lie in a mountaintop in eastern Kentucky.
So to answer your overall question - yes, I can fully believe transitioning from coal to natural gas while we effectively ignored all other energy investments (at scale) was a stupid move in a long-term environmental lense. In 100 years I think it will be obvious that if fracking had not been invented it would have been better overall for the environment. Time will tell!
I also am a natural pessimist :)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61901033
Russia on the other hand is largely uninhabited and its gas deposits don't require fracking - they only started testing the technology this year.
Those measures take years to decades to materialise to a significant degree. Still, all those measures are currently being implemented, and rightfully so.
In comparison, developing a new fracking site from a mere technical point of view takes less than a year.
That's not to say we should do one or the other or prefer fracking over renewables. However, when the alternatives are to either continue to be at the mercy of a potentially hostile power or to use less environmentally friendly energy sources (such as coal or lignite) or to accept regular power outages as a consequence, simultaneously exploring all possible better avenues (including nuclear energy, which as mentioned is still readily available right now) is pretty much a no-brainer.
So Germany can just as well continue to dig up and burn lignite instead of starting fracking.
2. It's very small amounts and it can be captured (and is in some instances)
3. The US reduced emissions while growing energy output thanks to nat. gas displacing coal.
We don't have to take your word for it, we can see that nat. gas energy production is cleaner than coal, because we have actual data from our transition off of coal to nat. gas.
The methane talking point is just that. It's not an actual issue, and you can see it's not from overall numbers.
If you truly cared about emissions you'd want the current best solution that drives it down. That would mean displacing coal at all cost. The current best way to do that is nat. gas and fracking.
Nuclear isn't built up as a baseline, renewables aren't ready for peak loads, and outsourcing it to someone else only shuffles it around. So... natural gas it is...
Ditching a fossil fuel to another fossil fuel is just perpetuating the problem, it's not solving anything. It's like going from a meth addiction to a cocaine addition, sure cocaine isn't as bad, you'll still be absolutely fucked up in a decade though
First off, I'd say total emissions by electricity generation is a great single metric to look at.
Second, those studies you didn't even reference were most likely FUD. I've worked on companies who organized those through call centers to spread the misinformation about fracking.
But instead of coming up with useless analogies about cocaine and falling back on studies you didn't even reference, please respond to each of my points instead of talking past me.
Maybe start with the fact that there are no replacements ready for coal other than nat. gas.
I'm all for building up nuclear energy and even battery banks. But currently nothing is available other than nat. gas to take the load that coal has produced.
Soo... the best way to reduce emissions is to use nat. gas until a solution is built up and ready. (cough, nuclear, cough)
Renewables will most likely never be able to handle the peak load, you need a baseline source, that's either fossil fuels or nuclear energy thanks to their densities.
---- edit ----
@lm28469: You're still not addressing any of my points. Dropping a study and calling it a day is not a conversation. At least pick out a point to defend from it...
But here's the cool thing. We don't need to read through your biased studies!
We know nat. gas is cleaner than coal and we can see it from reduction of emissions as we transition off of coal to nat. gas.
If you want to displace nat. gas as well, support nuclear as the new baseline standard! Or come up with better battery tech!
Until then, it's not ready and we need energy so we don't die... so nat. gas it is. Or coal worst case.
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/study-links-fracki...
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27012022/fracking-air-pol...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4016083/
Studies you don't like are fake right ?
> I've worked on companies who organized those through call centers to spread the misinformation about fracking.
Is that supposed to make you sound more truth-worthy ?
They're in top 30 by energy production in the world, around 50% of the energy produced being nuclear. And there untapped gas reserves as well. Coal has been disrupted since Russia invaded the east in 2014
If I'm not mistaken, nuclear capacity was to be expanded considerably in 2022 - 2023, to sell more energy to EU (specifically Poland)
Compare a map of Ukraine’s gas deposits [1] with one of Russian-occupied territory [2].
> oil and gas, both items that Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of
Ukraine has enough to rival, if not dethrone, Moscow [3]. It is accurate to say the Kremlin is burying Russians in large part to protect its energy profits.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-gas-potential-of-ind...
[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/War_Mapper/status/158542369079528...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_in_Ukraine#Prove...
Meanwhile climate change deniers are sitting on their couches pulling things out of their asses, cherry picking data from publications they didn't write, removing all context to support their argument. Posting content on Youtube, Twitter, TikTok and Substack is all these people do, either for subscribers or for conservative think tanks financed by the fossil fuel industry.
Complicated systems tend to show only subtle signs before they rapidly collapse. AI is a new approach that might actually help us asses the risks better.
Climate change is a mine field. Telling people that we are going to be okay, while not doing anything to manage the risk is a lie. Rapid, extreme changes are coming, and they are going to test our civilization's ability to survive. Many parts of the planet will be inhabitable. And that's in a few decades, not even centuries.
Unfortunately this is out reality, like it or not. We don't get another one, so it's important what we are doing something about it. But we don't because of people like you living comfortable lies, not willing to look up.
I don't think it's going to be a few decades. I think as you said the models are too conservatives. We are already seeing things that they didn't predict.
I don't think that's a "scientific consensus" on the end of the civilised world coming, that's what I'm talking about, that's what the narrative is.
There are countless examples of Ancient Greek cities/towns that are now several feet under the sea-level, and still, here we are, ~2500 years later and still doing our thing. The Cyrenaica and Northern Africa more generally was/were the bread-basket of the Roman Empire, they're not anymore, and yet, here we are, ~2000 years later, we've found other bread-baskets.
The civilized world now comprises of 8 billion people on a planet of depleting resources, energy crisis, pollution, and worst of all a man-made climate change that's many magnitudes faster than any before.
Good luck finding another bread-basket on an inhabitable planet with oceans having widespread oxygen-starved dead zones, a malfunctioning biological carbon pump, collapsing food web, extreme temperatures, intense droughts, diseases and conflicts.
We are seeing these happening already, and it's only going to get worst, much worst, as we reach the tipping points.
Academically, I would assume that for the majority of people, science was something you were taught to trust growing up, being told that scientists have your best interests in mind while they spend time finding out everything about the world and coming up with reasons/theories for the way the world works and interacts with itself. The world wouldn't be anything without science, they say.
Religion is based on a set of beliefs, followings, teachings, determined and taught/shared by "qualified" individuals like priests/pastors - followers were raised from a young age to follow, internalize, and spread their faith. The world wouldn't exist without God, they said.
When you go to church (catholic in this example), you're asked/silently obligated to donate to the church when the collection plate is passed around. You're giving money, and debatably power (in form of money) to the church to keep spreading their beliefs.
I think it would be foolish to assume that there weren't rich kings/countries hundred of years ago giving money to the church to influence certain activities/actions through religious decree/law. I would also be a fool to not believe the church would influence the governments to act in certain ways based on how much power the church had had to control/influence it's followers.
Today, we have numerous examples of corporations lobbying governmental and scientific institutions to push whatever is the cause de jour. There was corn syrup lobbying in the 2010's and who knows how far back, you had the food pyramid in the 90's that heavily promoted food groups that the USDA itself was subsidizing.
There's so many outside influences, blind faith/trust, etc. etc. that I feel comfortable in todays day and age saying that society in general "trusts" science like they would "trust" a religion to keep them safe and alive, and healthy - and therefore this "trust" can be exploited to invoke fear, uncertainty, and ultimately convince people that the harm they're going through or the actions they're being forced to take, is for their own good - with the other followers chastising or guilting the others or "non-believers" into believing what _they_ think is the truth.
Do you kind of see what I'm getting at? It might seem completely odd-ball to you, but it's how a lot of people interpret and understand what's going on. Science isn't this 100% true, be-all, end-all thing because it will _always_ corrupted by governments, corporate interests, NGO influence, etc. etc. etc.
Can you not see? The changes became so rapid in the last few years that you can just go outside and see for yourself, extreme temperatures, heat domes, cold waves, wildfires, droughts, intense storms, vanishing biodiversity. Once in a hundred years events one after another. I remember my childhood when we used to have four seasons, we barely have two now, a mild winter with occasional cold waves and a summer with extreme weather. No in-between. Biggest droughts we have ever seen. A lot of insects missing.
It's an absolutely giant, complex system that has enough opportunities in the works for humans - or groups of humans running corporations/NGOs/research groups - to exploit for personal profit/power/etc. meaning the end-goals are never truly achieved.
You have no recourse to your government for the decisions it makes - sure, you can vote - but your vote has such little power compared to the effort required to make meaningful decisions in society at large. Violence is out of the question legally, though the government sure likes to be violent towards its people when they want something from you.
I believe it's simply not possible for the government to simultaneously keep and grow its power and take complete care of its citizens. Governments are corporations with customers that are forced to buy products (road access, schooling, healthcare, as some examples) from them at the rate the government chooses at the service level they choose. You have no other options. Good luck with trying to change it when there's so many people all fighting amongst each other over inane things compared to this all-encompassing problem of the climate, like 'critical race theory', 'universal basic income', or 'building a wall'.
If we've already gone past the turning point as you have suggested with credible evidence, then why bother pushing so hard? We've already ruined the earth. Why not make things as comfortable as we can for the ones that are still around?
Bit of a defeatist attitude to take, but it seems like that's where it's going to inevitably if the climate scientists are right.
I don't know - I'd rather live in relative comfort because I owe nothing to the people of the future, and I wouldn't expect people in the past to owe me anything either...
reverse may also be true
"Solar PV capacity additions expand from 151 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 370 GW in 2030 and almost 600 GW in 2050, while wind capacity additions double to 210 GW in 2030 and rise to 275 GW in 2050."
Yeah, nah. Annual PV capacity production of around 400 GW in 2023 and 1 - 2 TW in 2030, based on publically announced investments. Probably more that Duckduckgo hasn't found for me. I haven't looked at wind, but given what's been in the news recently, 210 GW is low by a factor of five as well.
Looks like they're still using the same broken modelling methods, and the same broken integrated assessment model software.
The Europeans want to re-animate their domestic manufacturing for energy security reasons, after letting it die five or six years ago. First Solar is trucking on in the USA. India has ambitions to expand its production a lot. Not too many other places, to my knowledge.
How does that make sense. 400GW Peak? Average?
Or are they talking GWh
If the IEA can't use the right units in its reports, what hope is there.
[1] https://globalsolaratlas.info
But even the best model is going to get blindsided by politics. Europe would have been well severed by massively investing over the summer in PV to reduce it’s dependence on Russian natural gas. They didn’t do so but I was very much expecting a push for the fastest to install alternative to natural gas turbines which is PV.
Roll-to-roll printing on flexible plastic film is a lot cheaper than refining silicon, slicing it up, and embedding it in glass to make PV modules.
The unknowns are all upside risk with PV and wind. Not so much with fossil fuels.