Natural gas compliments renewables until battery storage and renewables overproduction pushes out natural gas. It also produces smaller amounts of CO2 per unit of electricity produced versus coal.
Recently, there was an HN thread about large amounts of UK wind curtailment. The largest battery storage system in Europe just went live to provide grid services that’ll negate the need for natural gas to provide those services, while reducing wind curtailment.
In Germany, the main function of LNG long term will be to smooth the transition of households from burning gas for heating to using heat pumps. As LNG is expensive, people who can will switch sooner than later. Also, rolling out heat pumps is going to take a long time and some people will be dependent on gas for as long as that is going to take.
A secondary role for LNG is to power gas peaker plants when renewables fall short. Mainly this can be done with existing gas plants. There's very little need for building more of those. Also, coal plants remain popular for this. Before the war the plan was replacing coal with gas plants. With current gas prices, that plan is out of the window and we're now looking at increased speed of the rollout of wind, solar, and batteries instead.
Germany's steel and chemistry sector require large amounts of natural gas.
In general, natural gas (currently LNG) was also to smooth a transition towards green hydrogen, the plan being to build infrastructure that can burn/store/use both, as explicitly stated by Federal ministries/agencies.
> that plan is out of the window
There hasn't been officially confirmed, soon there will be a report called "Power plant strategy 2026" that will give a better outlook as to what is gonna happen this decade.
> There hasn't been officially confirmed, soon there will be a report called "Power plant strategy 2026" that will give a better outlook as to what is gonna happen this decade.
It's a highly political topic.
Blue hydrogen from LNG is more of a research topic / aspirational thing for the fossil fuel industry than it is an actual thing. This seems to be more of a talking point than something that is being done at scale with any decent capture of carbon.
LNG in the industry is of course a thing. Heating things is done with gas and coal mostly. A lot of that will have to be transitioned away to something else. Hydrogen might be an option. But some industries might also switch to other forms of heating. E.g. there are some ways to use electricity directly for this via things like induction or plasma heating. Historically, using fossil fuels was cheap. But when you are going to use vast amounts of electricity to generate green hydrogen for industrial heating use cases, this changes. Using the electricity directly might be more efficient in some cases.
It’s a good thing then that Tesla is building 40GWh/year of storage at their new Megapack factory in Lathrop, CA, although the more utility scale storage manufacturing capacity built, the better. We’re going to need a lot as you mentioned, and they’re currently sold out for the next two and a half years.
> War and subsidies have turbocharged the LNG transition
The IEA projects "renewables are set to account for 90% of the increase in global generation capacity" between 2022 and 2027, "almost 30% higher than the agency’s forecast in 2021."
Forecasts would be nice I guess. It was more to point out that renewable generation equipment generally has quite a low utilization factor compared to the existing infrastructure, so a given increase in "capacity" does not reflect the same increase in actual production.
for a rough estimate, divide wind and solar by 3, nat gas by 2 and leave nuclear untouched. this suggests that the actual figure will be closer to 80%.
It was an opinion on the source, not on what it says. Your second comment still doesn't adress any claims of the article, it just attributes malicious intent to it without mentioning what makes you think that.
The claim is that while rich countries don't really care enough about the climate to seriously pursue a "green transition", many now realized that they do care about energy self-sufficiency to accelerate it. Do you disagree? Do you think the article says something different?
My opinion is that The Economist is looking for any angle to support the fleecing of the American people to the tune of $130B which we just handed over to the arms industry. The war was crafted by this industry through its puppeteering of the US government for expressly this purpose.
The Economist might as well write an article about the long-term positive impact on the planet of humans being obliterated by the nuclear war them and their neocon buddies are happy to risk.
95% of the people I've discussed this war with have absolutely no clue about the politics and history behind the current conflict and are repeating headlines they got from US corporate (propaganda) media outlets.
Which again is an opinion on the source and does not mention the content in any way. I must conclude that you're not interested in an object level discussion about the topic at hand.
I mean, how much would you expect people to try to constructively engage with the content of an RT article saying that the war is great for the Russian economy? You know the conclusion was manufactured in advance and why. It's the same here.
In another comment I did try to engage with the content and it got buried harder than this one shrug
I'm not sure how to make this more clear, but "the content" is presented in bad faith.
This is like writing an article about how plant life is thriving in a field because they were fertilized by the blood of hundreds of soldiers and you're saying, "Yeah, but what do you think about the plants growing better?"
You're shocked because the information you have about the situation is wrong and incomplete. Not that I blame anyone for that, western corporate media is a tool of the arms industry that's profiting from this war and they're good at what they do - manufacture consent for war.
In fact, Ukraine just spent years violating a peace treaty (at the behest of the western powers) and bombing ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine which is what prompted this war. I'm not going to make it my job to educate everyone on HN on 20 years of eastern European history, but if you'd like to take that upon yourself you can start by looking up the Minsk agreement and Merkel's comments on it, and Victoria Nuland on tape hand picking the new Ukraine government after a coup.
There is plenty of room to disagree with Russia's actions /and/ be informed on the history, but it wouldn't be a position of shock. That's coming from getting your education from western (corporate) propaganda.
Can you elaborate on why the Minsk agreement had to be enacted in the first place, i.e. what conflict the ceasefire was meant to cease? And how that conflict started? And who fought in that conflict? I'd really like to know.
Ukrainian civil war started by a trump style coup of a democratically elected president in Kiev who was elected largely because he was very popular in the East and South of Ukraine.
Western propaganda pretends that the East and South of Ukraine had zero agency or will to decide its own future. This is why they called the crimean referendum a sham despite trustworthy western polls validating painfully clearly that it was accurate.
The Minsk agreements gave limited independence to the Donbass. Apparently the regimes in Kiev couldn't handle that which is why they signed the agreements and then broke them.
> My opinion is that The Economist is looking for any angle to support the fleecing of the American people to the tune of $130B which we just handed over to the arms industry. The war was crafted by this industry through its puppeteering of the US government for expressly this purpose.
Care to explain how exactly the US is to blame for Putin invading Ukraine due to Ukrainians ousting Yanukovych 8 years ago?
I did in a cousin comment but no answer your question, not really, no. 95% of the time people aren't looking for information with an open mind, they're looking to argue/debate and defend their foregone conclusions that have become part of their identity and so are immutable. Carl Sagan has a lot of good commentary on this problem.
90s Economist was more of a neoliberal front preaching privatization and austerity programs for third-world countries. While heavily ideologized, it tried to keep things from going too extreme, not it is just another sensationalist brown paper.
The Russian Invasion of Ukraine has been such an amazing tool for distinguishing actual anti-war people from anti-west ghouls. It's a completely indefensible war of aggression by an imperialistic power against it's former subject but since the imperialistic power is Russia suddenly all these "anti-war" activists think it's fine.
I am confident enough that the West is still able to decimate a middling power like Russia. They have the GDP of Italy for fuck sake they're not the USSR.
Yes actually, a Ukrainian victory will in fact stop the war. Furthermore, an ending to the invasion that results in Ukrainians being ethnically cleansed and Russia in a position to pursue more invasions is not a better outcome than war (specifically the one that Russia chose and continues to choose to pursue) for quite a few very obvious reasons.
okay.. but at this point ukraine has recieved more money/material than years worth of russian military budgets. Where is the victory?
Also, what is it? is russia 100% incompetent, or is it a fiendish foe? We have had to hear for a year now about how russia is so totally inept that ukranian farmers are victorious against them using nothing both farming tractors, but at the same time the west must send ungodly amounts of money and material their way, and there is no victory. Which one is it?
It seems the west is willing to fight to the last ukranian.
I just dont see how the west meddling here is gonna make any outcome better. So far nothing indicates I am wrong.
We haven't sent them that much of actual material and most of that is outdated. A lot has been promised but deliveries outfit scheduled years from now. Money is useful but you can't shoot it, and a lot of Ukrainian capital is lost because of the war. And the most important resource, soldiers, is the one thing we can't send them. And Russia can just conscript as many as they want.
And it's Ukraine itself that wants their territories back, including Crimea and Donbass. Making it hard to negotiate. But also understandable, once you start giving in, you're giving Russia an incentive to do it all over again and capture now territory.
> But also understandable, once you start giving in, you're giving Russia an incentive to do it all over again and capture now territory.
Not just Russia. If Russia succeeds, China is invading Taiwan next, and the whole global economy is grinding to a halt because like 80 % of world semiconductor industry is there.
I don't think these issues are linked to be honest. China has a very different strategy. More plotting and long-term scheming, less brute force like Russia.
They'll sneak their way in just like they're rapidly expanding their influence in Africa, buying European ports and airports etc. Their tactics are completely different and our response must be as well. Of course long-term planning is the biggest weakness of democracies and the CCP's strength. So I doubt we'll be able to prevent it.
> plotting and long-term scheming, less brute force like Russia
The way Xi screwed the pooch on Hong Kong, something Beijing was without controversy entitled to, looks more like an impatient dictator than the China of decades prior.
Ukraine will not win. No amount of dumping money into a country is going to help with this size difference, unless many more countries mobilise their actual military. That won't happen because then it goes from a regional conflict to a large-scale war and more countries might feel like meddling. Then there might be a world war.
They're already, slowly, winning? And I think people have forgotten that the massive size difference didn't help America win in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Vietnam - in the long term.
It's going to be a long war, though. It's effectively been running for a decade already.
The problem is that there is no reason to believe the war would stop even if Ukraine managed to push all Russian troops from their territory (with or without Crimea), which is quite unlikely in the first place. In fact, I've yet to hear a single concrete scenario for how that war could end other than with either government collapsing. I don't believe the Russian government will collapse any time soon.
Assuming China will attack Taiwan in the meantime, which I think is a lot more likely than not, it seems the world is looking at a lot of war indeed, perhaps even global. Even more senseless killing while issues like the climate and global poverty will lose the little relevance they have now. The future seems really sad.
At least I can't see how the current Russian administration could survive a loss in the Ukraine. On top of that, if the war drags on for years, the sanctions and general production losses are going to bite. Various far regions of Russia (Vladivostok?) may start looking for options. No need for overt rebellion, just tactically ignoring edicts from Moscow may crack the federation.
The future seems sad yes, but this situation didn't appear out of nowhere. The dragon seed in Russia (and China) has been growing for decades.
but maybe they're actually not? if they're losing, this is how it'll be reported to you: they're winning -> they're winning -> they've nearly won -> *silence for years* -> ukraine is now part of russia, bringing the decades-long quagmire to an end.
sometimes things are out of your hands, like when russia invades ukraine.
recall that i was responding to someone saying that anti-war folks are actually pro-genocide and anti-west. so, from the anti-war perspective, if what you want is peace, (which is what anti-war means), then "arming ukraine for a decisive victory" is what, exactly? it's giving ukraine weapons, or, to put it in other words: it's giving money to weapons manufacturers.
if you think giving money to weapons manufacturers will lead somehow to peace, then i don't know what to tell you.
you could shorten the war by aiding russia, but obviously no one wants that. that would genuinely encourage violence, like when the united states aids saudi arabia against the people of yemen.
since the rest of the world can't make choices on russia's behalf, the only thing to be done, from an anti-war perspective, is to mitigate the damage russia does to ukraine, and encourage, through non-violent means, a cessation of violence.
arming ukraine is the opposite of that.
what else could the united states do? (or whatever country, i'll just go with the united states for the sake of brevity.) the united states could invade ukraine too, to counter russia. would that end the russia-ukraine war? no, it would just start the america-russian war.
all i'm trying to convey is that anti-war people are, probably, for the most part, actually just that. conversely, if you're pro-ukraine, or anti-russia, or anti-ukraine, or pro-russia, you are, probably, for the most part, actually not anti-war. you have other priorities, which is your business, not mine. but i won't just be called pro-genocide by someone who's gotten themselves all worked up into a froth for war.
So your response is to do literally nothing as a country gets rolled through and its civilians tortured and raped?.
If you think that sitting back and doing nothing will somehow let Ukrainians have a better life then you do not know the realities of living under Russian rule.
I find it strange that this kind of appeasement and bowing to another power to let them do what they please is so popular now just like it was in WW2.
Appeasing the fascists didn’t work then and it work now, the thing that stops countries like Russia is military defeat.
Suddenly so many people are actually pacifists, yeah I don't buy it either. And in their anti Western hatred they are willing to sacrifice a sovereign state to a Russian invasion.
A question I pose to these people- after Ukraine what other land is Putin allowed to grab?
heres the deal: not intervening is not the same thing as agreeing. Not wanting to throw gasoline on the fire is not the same as thinking the fire is great, or having put it in the first place.
I like how you refer to people being able to defend from being enslaved and murdered as "throwing gasoline on the fire". If I started torturing and killing your family, would you let me do it because trying to stop is throwing gasoline on the fire?
Also, Russia repeatedly invaded Poland with two other allies (Prussia, Austria) and divided it three times and the polish didn't get their country back by being nice. (I didn't even talk about ww2).
and I would wish these things didnt happen. I ask you now. Are more people dying by us throwing weapons there? can ukraine win? so far the answer appears to be, yes, more people are dying, and no. Ukraine cannot win.
What happens when ukraine runs out of soldiers to carry the shit we send there? will YOU take their place? just how inhuman can you be, after all? and if russia wins, how many died that wouldnt have needed to. how inhuman can we be then? or is it then fine that they died?
This is a trolley problem, the train is on the track to genocide and oppression of 40 million people with the other track being uncertain and you're standing here arguing that we should not touch the lever and that this position is somehow radically distinct from some other guy who is arguing that we shouldn't flip the lever.
It might work for your conscience but if we put either of you in charge the outcome for those 40 million people is functionally the same. Distinct maybe, different no.
I do not support any party in this war, though I'm not really pacifist.
It's not worth dying for NATO membership or an ukrainian Crimea. And nobody should be forced to fight in any war.
It is about cost/benefit.
If Ukraine would tell:
We are looking for a compromise (no NATO membership, Crimea belongs to Russia, ...), I could change my mind and support them.
If Russia would invade another country there's a new cost/benefit ratio.
And I think Russia will not invade any western country. I live in Germany and I'm not scared of Russia. They (Soviet Union actually) left East Germany peacefully.
This is truer then you know, the world must make the cost of Russia trying to take over another country so expensive both financially and militarily that they do not try this again.
Don't forget Ukraine is not the first, Russia has invaded and sometimes even entirely annexed countries in the past.
> If Ukraine would tell: We are looking for a compromise (no NATO membership, Crimea belongs to Russia, ...), I could change my mind and support them.
Ukraines mere existence is what upsets Russia, it's the reason for this war. It has nothing to do with Crimea and nothing to do with NATO.
Russia wants all of Ukraine, they want to subjugate them completely.
Maybe I'm wrong. But I think John Mearsheimer got it right in 2014:
"Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new government in Kiev
to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow, making it
clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a functioning state before he
would allow it to become a Western stronghold on Russia’s doorstep."
This is happening now.
"Russia wants all of Ukraine, they want to subjugate them completely."
I don't think so. Russia annexed the territory it really wants. If Ukraine demilitarizes they would make a deal.
> I don't think so. Russia annexed the territory it really wants. If Ukraine demilitarizes they would make a deal.
How can you possibly make a lasting deal with a country that wipes their arse with international agreements when it’s no longer convenient for them?.
If you think a “deal” with Russia would do anything other then let it rearm itself and reinvade the rest of the country I have a bridge to sell you.
After all, Russia already promised to never invade Ukraine and to never never threaten the sovereignty of Ukraine in exchange for them giving up their nukes.
How well did that “deal” go for Ukraine?.
> I don't think so. Russia annexed the territory it really wants. If Ukraine demilitarizes they would make a deal.
Then you haven’t been listening to what the Russians have been openly saying on tv themselves.
The Russians are very open about how Ukraine is a fake state, how it is a mistake and how its cultural identity should be destroyed.
You don't think Russia would invade the Baltics? Or are they not west enough for you? Could you outline the difference between a Western country that Russia wouldn't dare invade vs nations that in your mind deserve to be ethnically cleansed?
But I'm not sure that Russia will never invade Azərbaycan. (Azərbaycan has oil and is not in NATO and frome time to time they attack Armenia or Armenia attacks Azərbaycan).
I remember the second (Putin's) war in Tschetschenia. I've known since 20 years that Russia/Putin is ruthless.
How to deal with Russia? I actually opt for appeasement and containment.
I see Russia as aggressive middle power with nukes which tries to be a regional hegemon. (sorry for the Mearsheimer jargon)
You can't fight it down completely, because of nukes. You can't destroy Russia's military industry.
I would treat it as a smaller and lighter version of the Soviet Union. NATO did not interfere in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland back then. These countries are free now which is great.
Countries like Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan should try not to poke the bear and should not gamble that NATO will bail them out.
This is bad. Maybe it will get better with smart politics but it sure get's worse with bad politics.
I'm not advocating NATO boots on the ground.
It is the Ukrainians that are dying in the trenches. Zelensky has been quite clear: just give us the tools we'll do the fighting.
The latter is pretty obvious (we're talking English discussion platform where you can create account in ten seconds with no verification and I'm not sure if there's any anti-bot measures).
The former ... most programmers are rich and they are convinced they are rich because they are awesome instead of lucky. Most programmers aren't very social or have emotional intelligence. Most programmers think they are better than others and are prone to "fuck you, got mine" thinking. And look how many startups are based on doing extremely exploitative and illegal things - Uber with illegal cabs, Airbnb with illegal hotels, and so on. Of course those people don't give a shit about suffering.
Russia has been infamous for sowing division in the West using information warfare, and its no surprise that anti-West/anti-American's end up picking up pro-Russian propaganda which has become incredibly apparent throughout this war. Propaganda is designed to build lies from a truth or misinterpreted fact so it seems believeable; its not so much that a website/forum needs to be _controlled_ or _backed_, or that bots need to be leveraged most of the time. Plus, most people think they are too smart to believe propaganda which honestly means they are more likely to fall for it.
Nah from what I can tell 2003 broke a lot of people's brains in the same way 2001 did. The people who were against it the whole time got platformed in a way that they hadn't at all before, and surprise surprise some of them weren't actually against it on _moral_ grounds. Noam Chomsky is a great example.
> investment in green energy sources will make them more competitive faster than expected and thus spur the transition
The article is worth the read. Apparently "S&P Global, a data firm, thinks emissions from energy combustion will peak in 2027, at a level the world would still be producing in 2028 had the war not happened." This isn't theorized market activity, it's actual changes in generation capacity plans made over the last twelve months.
The Department of Energy literally invented modern fracking; see the Eastern Gas Shales Project, which lasted for a decade and a half. Early commercial fracking worked off of shale mapping performed at Sandia National Lab; reference here https://energy.sandia.gov/wp-content/gallery/uploads/FINAL-H... (which research continues).
Finally, the government provided $10 billion in tax cuts for unconventional gas drilling over the past thirty years, so even that private R&D was subsidized.
Exactly. I would add to this that pro-longed price uncertainty for fossil fuels causes people to invest in alternatives to minimize their risk and exposure and to divest from any solutions involving coal or gas. Even if it's profitable right now, it might very well not be in just the blink of an eye. Coal and gas related assets are increasingly toxic from an investment point of view as well.
Also, renewables were already very competitive before the war started. The added price uncertainty since then is just widening the gap. Anyone who has the option is considering putting solar on their roof, replacing their gas boiler with a heat pump, and buying an EV. Once people start receiving 1000 euro monthly bills for heating, people are going to get creative trying to fix that. Such a thing has happened this winter and people are acting accordingly.
1) Supply is constrained (by the war and sanctions), demand is fixed to rising, so price goes up.
2) Price goes up
2 a) Demand remains the same or increases (we're talking about energy so demand will always be increasing)
2 b) there is more demand for alternatives, including dirty ones (coal) but also green ones (solar, wind, etc).
3) Businesses see an opportunity for higher returns
3 a) Increased investment in fossil fuel energy sources to take advantage of the higher prices. Wells with dirtier oil that were idle are brought back online because they are profitable, higher cost extraction gears up like tar sands.
3 b) Increased investment in green energy sources to take advantage of higher energy prices.
I don’t know if this is addressed by this article (I cant read it because paywall) but I’m gonna make a leap of assumption—because this is the economist and are likely to be guilty.
I’m seeing more and more of a new kind type of climate denialism pop up lately, which I like to call climate optimism. A climate optimist is aware that the climate crisis is real, is caused by humans, and is an existential threat to humanity. However, they claim that the worst of the climate crisis has already been solved with technology and capitalism. I.e. they think that the current and developing technology solution will prevent more climate disasters and now it is just up to the free market to apply it. In other words, there is nothing more that governments must do but to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry (sometimes natural gas is excepted). A prime example of a climate optimist is the youtube channel Kurzgesagt. But I see this a lot from people that like to cite Our World In Data.
This is climate denial because it completely ignores global trends in carbon emissions, production capabilities, infrastructure rollout in poorer economies, etc. We are still increasing our carbon emissions (albeit at a slower rate) at a time when we needed to have stopped releasing CO2 altogether.
EDIT: After reading the article (as someone posted an archive) I see—to my surprise—that this article is not guilty of my accusations.
Despite the drubbing the Economist is taking in this thread (and I'm no fan myself) this article is pretty much innocent of this accusation. The article simply points to some modeling which indicates European/American subsidies for green energy and the increased friction in the global oil/gas markets created by the war in Ukraine have accelerated energy transitions in advanced economies.
It makes no conclusions about the future beyond these models and does not hand-wave away climate risk at all.
I feel like it's telling that you need a break from the internet if someone being optimistic that progress is being made on addressing climate change at all is problematic to you.
You point to Kurzgesagt, and while I'm not much of a fan of them, their most recent video on climate change presents a view that the situation is dire but not hopeless, which is a healthy view to present if you're aiming to convince people to care.
I'm not sure what your position is. Technology won't progress? Investing money into research and scaling up production doesn't lower the marginal cost? Monetary incentives aren't better at getting things done? We can't "avert the crisis" without going back to adopting pre-industrial lifestyles/communism/veganism or wear sheep wool clothes?
What's the "appropriate" response that you'd feel okay with?
My position is pretty much “yes” to all of these questions. Technology won’t progress at the rate needed to prevent the worst of the climate disaster, we need to sink way more money into research and production, not only to lower the cost, but to flat out dump infrastructure where it is needed (yes this means Germany should pay for solar plants and high voltage powerlines in Tanzania and not expect anything in return). This is a crisis which was caused by government inaction, and it won’t go away until government takes action. If they had acted in the late 90s or the early 2000s (like they were asked to; and according to popular opinion at the time) then perhaps the steps wouldn’t need to be as drastic, but as it stands, we will probably need to print a bunch of money to build out the infrastructure, subsidize the home improvements, etc. and enforce a hard limit on polluting industries. I’m aware that printing money causes inflation, but because of government inaction we simply are running out of options, the climate disaster is infinitely worse than inflation.
I don’t think communism will save us actually (and we don’t have time to wait for a communist revolution anyway), and forcing people to adopt veganism or pre-industrial lifestyles isn’t gonna work either. But we do have to put a limit to carbon entitled behavior. We do have to limit the number of private cars on the roads, and the amount of meat in the western dinner plate. We could have done it gradually but at this point there is no option left but a hefty carbon tax which will prove fatal to many of these industries.
What is the appropriate response I feel okay with? Not denying the severity of the situation. Claiming that we’ve solved the climate crisis is a simple lie (this article doesn’t do that by the way; I think it is important to mention that).
I don't disagree with you. I invite you to take a step back and stand in the shoes of someone who is exhibiting "carbon entitled behaviour". Do you think what you're saying here and your hardline stance on measures is going to get them to behave closer to your ideal? If not, how else are you going to make this happen? A lot of these people are politicians, so "just impose a higher tax" isn't a measure, it is a result of a measure (that measure being convincing those people to do what you want).
You say we don't have time for a communist revolution. We don't have time for any kind of revolution, because revolutions famously don't really work or improve anything. This is extra relevant because your other statements still lean on the premise of a revolution happening, just one with consequences you think are more important than communism.
While I actually believe capitalism is a huge contributor to the climate crisis I don't think it is solely responsible. I don't rule out that in an alternative communist universe governments would have acted equally recklessly and created a similar mess. I think that the only real idealism which could have prevented this is actual democracy where power isn't unevenly distributed among the wealthy class, and working class people would have an actual say in theyr governments climate policy (which could happen under communism but not guaranteed to). You actually hint at the democratic fault by accurately observing the role of politicians among the carbon elite and the carbon hogs.
As for revolutions. I don't think what I'm calling for is anywhere near to a revolution. We only have to reduce our meat consumption and our private car travels. We consumed less meat and drove less just a couple of decades ago—at the start of this mess. And today we have technology and—more imortantly—infrastructure to mitigate some of the pain of this reduction. Ideally we need to go far further but like you correctly said, we don't have time for that.
I notice quite the opposite, not just about climate but many topics. Doomsaying. People who will only believe and repeat something if the narrative is “this is the worst things have ever been and it is continuing to get worse”. When confronted with information to the contrary, there is always a scope change “What about x”.
For the many people who are criticizing the article for being pro-war: the article is simply claiming that the energy war between Russia and the West is increasing global prices for fossil fuels and is spurring concerns over energy security. Increased prices for fossil fuels makes green energy more cost competitive and concerns over energy security drive nations to find alternative energy sources. Increases in the cost competitiveness of green energy and the search of nations for new energy sources has increased private and public investment in green energy, speeding up the energy transition.
This simple chain of cause and effect is oversimplified, which is why there's a whole article written about it.
At no point does the article claim "war is good because it's spurring green energy spending", or "we should have more wars to spend more on green energy", or "war has downsides, but upsides like increased green energy spending are worth it".
If you think that any statements that address the positive externalities of war simply shouldn't be uttered (because they glorify war, or encourage war, or whatever), then you're an idiot who thinks everyone else is an idiot.
Assuming one believes your argument, a more charitable conclusion is that some people may be misguided, and a reexamination of their stance may be warranted.
Calling people idiots isn’t going to change people’s minds, and people hold bad opinions about things all the time for reasons that aren’t as simplistic as “they’re an idiot”.
Idiot is me being charitable. People who believe that speech should be limited specifically because that speech may engender beliefs in others that they disagree with are idiots at best, and malicious authoritarians at worst. This isn't free speech absolutism, I'm not advocating for unrestricted misinformation, propaganda, or calls to violence. I'm stating that people who believe that "wrongthink" is not permissible are idiots, and I have zero interest in trying to change their minds (at least over the internet).
As an example, I've encountered feminists who think that the very real issues men struggle with in America should not be discussed because the very act of discussing those issues might make some people think "hey, in some ways men are worse off then women" and this would influence those people to not support feminism. I'm not trying to pick on feminism here, it's just an example. If these feminists thought that the issues men face aren't real, or that the issues women face are so immeasurably worse as to make men's issue immaterial, that would be one thing and I would be happy to explain to them why I think they're wrong (and listen to their rebuttals). But I have no interest in engaging with someone who thinks that rhetoric can be suppressed and ignored just because it's inconvenient for them and their cause.
You say it is not free speech absolutism, but in the same paragraph you say that any sort of limitation of speech or belief that some thoughts are simply bad is something only idiots want or have. It doesn't read as a well-rounded belief that came about from measured, reasonable thinking. It just reads as if you're angry.
How is asserting that you're angry an ad hominem attack? Has it somehow become a crime to have emotions, or to express them instead of pure cold logic? There was no ad hominem.
Did you maybe skim the comment and not actually read it? My interpretation was that not letting people even voice some state-of-the-world opinions is an excessive speach limitation.
I do read the anger though, but I feel it's not the destructive kind, more the disappointed at the state of public discourse.
There's an entire subsection of politics that's appeared, made entirely from the worst possible misreadings of sensible boring policy wonkery. The most recent example is people going bananas about "15-minute cities", as if being able to walk to the shops is some sort of communist plot.
Peoples lifelihood is under attack, by the ever openening wage gap, by ai replacing jobs and the elites just ignoring it, over even worse propelling the change.
Any wounded animal crawls to safety and snarls at anything coming close. Its idiotic, but understandable, actually for this sort of prolonged hostility by the environment, the resistance has been quite gentle.
People aren't afraid of the convenience. The 15 minute cities project comes with movement restrictions (in the name of climate) a la China in some areas like Oxford, I recall heated debate over that part.
>At no point does the article claim "war is good because it's spurring green energy spending"
Instead it pretends it has significant upsides that are based upon a spurious theory.
Realistically renewables require an intense amount of capital that this war has suddenly made a lot more expensive. This will hamper green energy investment - older plants will be kept running for longer, new green energy plants won't get built. This will not be good for green energy.
The article is just a slightly less crass form of war cheerleading that they probably hope will age better than their 2003 Iraq war cheerleading.
Would the article be better if it just commented on the acceleration of investment in renewables, leaving unsaid the cause of said acceleration because some readers find it distasteful?
This is one of the more surprisingly anti-intellectual threads I’ve seen on HN.
If an article about investment in swimming classes that was boosted by a series of drowned children, and praises those classes for how they also increase overall health and fitness, the article is pro-drowning?
There have been some Russian articles indicating that the Ukraine war gave a boost to the Russian economy, which is why it grew this year.
They were exhibiting nothing more than a purely objective opinion based upon the purest of evidence of course.
Many Russians would believe that the idea that an article like that used spurious evidence to push a pro war agenda absurd. Like being pro drowning, as you put it.
> the Russian economy, which is why it grew this year
This is basement-level trolling. The Russian economy shrank last year. Its central bank just forecast between a 1% contraction and 1% growth for 2023 [1].
I’m sure you’re familiar with supply and demand. The investment in green tech is driven by price of renewables compared to price of fossil fuels.
A big decline in supply of fossil fuels (which is what has happened in Europe due to the war) shifts the trade-off significantly in favor of green energy. This shift can be so dramatic that it drives up the short term cost of green energy. That’s a good problem to have because it just means demand is really high, which can be solved by more investment in the supply side.
Your thesis that this would somehow reduce investment is completely backwards. You sell pickaxes during a gold rush, not before or after.
Yes, that's precisely why I said that the cost of capital going up due to war (higher interest rates) would have a dampening effect on green energy which is very capital intensive.
That's called "supply and demand in action".
The pro war argument (the Economist's) would *ignore* this facet, arguing only "fossil fuels are more expensive -> green energy will definitely be more popular".
> why I said that the cost of capital going up due to war (higher interest rates) would have a dampening effect on green energy which is very capital intensive
If only someone looked at the rate of new and projected investment into green energy after a period of both (a) Russia invading Ukraine and (b) rising interest rates. They could write an article about it and clear up the confusion.
That their evidence says actually that renewables were trending down in price before the war rather than trying to attribute it to a war they happen to like.
> renewables were trending down in price before the war rather than trying to attribute it to a war
You didn’t read the article because it never makes this claim. In particular, you got a foundational fact incorrect inasmuch as renewable prices are not going down. Nobody’s energy prices are. But relative to fossil fuels, on a real basis, they’ve become more competitive.
While I don't agree with the post you're replying to, the IEA has a long history of terrible predictions with renewable energy. Not sure if they've improved recently, but for the better part of two decades, they predicted negligible growth in the solar market, even after being contradicted every single year:
'Yet the reality is that the return of brown fuels is a subplot in a much grander story. By making coal, gas and oil scarcer and dearer—prices remain well above long-run averages, despite recent falls—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given renewable power, which is mostly generated domestically, a significant strategic and economic edge.'
Classic Rothchild/Agnelli Economist - never mind the 'heat or eat' struggling humans, this is really helping the 'renewable power' industrialists...
yes, it really quite would be a shame if someone noticed how wars tend to always magically reinforce and favor some goals and ideals of the upper elites. Never the peasants on the floor.
Im sure the western powers are extremely sad about the war, despite how it obviously amplifies a longstanding agenda. Coincidence, im sure.
In the dead of winter - which means fewer daylight hours, cloud cover, and snow cover, solar's going to be pretty inefficient, and so with a huge array you'd only get a little bit of energy out. And critically you also need batteries to time shift the energy to heat during the colder night time hours.
But it's a system that President Putin, or anyone else can't withhold. Relationships change.
The article makes a lot of bold claims of the energy transition happening faster than otherwise and then mostly ignore all the context that kind of goes against the point. The most egregious example of this is saying coal has been in a secular decline for 8 years but somehow a 1.2% increase in coal use last year lead to a record – for most people that would suggest that coal use has plateaued and is not in fact decreasing as the article would otherwise want you to believe.
Elsewhere it mentions 90% of new generating capacity will be renewable over the next years, but that also kind of ignores that there'll still be 10% not renewable capacity coming online and, oh yeah, India might also have new coal plants coming online in the years ahead.
This is pretty important when considering that coal is still the most common source of electricity but also that electricity is only a part of our energy needs – switching to electrified transportation, industry and heating systems will all create more demand for electricity. Seeing as we want to phase out coal we would need renewable energy to account for more than 100% of net new production and we haven't even reached that.
Even with all the speedup in the green transition happening over the past few years it still doesn't happen at close to the speed needed – in fact we're not even close to seeing the end of coal regardless of everything going on.
Define “in play”. The current administration campaigned on blocking all new exploratory leases, which they’ve done (and is now in a confusing legal battle). The current administration also blocked the Keystone pipeline.
So no new ventures, and no cheap transportation from our partners to our north. Seems like the North American industry is being starved.
"Lutzerath ... after Robert Habeck, the country’s energy minister, allowed a utility firm to mine for lignite ... In their panic to keep the lights on, policymakers across Europe and Asia are reopening coal mines ..."
The first statement is not correct and the continuation is misleading. It was not an individual descision of minister Habeck (Green party) to allow the demolition of Lützerath, but of the German federal parliament with its majority of Labour (SPD), Greens and Liberals (FDP) in the context of its Coal-fired Power Generation Termination Act ("Kohleverstromungsbeendigungsgesetz"). The previous version of the law from August 2020, enacted by a colation of the Conservatives (CDU/CSU) and Labour (SPD), provided for the demolition of five more villages and some little settlements. This was later, in March 2021, altered into its present form by a so-called guiding decision of the government (a coalition of Conservatives and Liberals) of North Rhine-Westphalia, the state in which Lüzerath is located, on which the modified federal law from December 2022 was based.
The Green Party of minister Harbeck was clearly the political force that had pushed hardest for a phase-out of coal as quickly and as extensively as possible. Of course, there are critics who believe that what has been achieved was not enough. Be that as it may, less would probably have been achieved without the participation of the Greens. For this reason it is dubious journalism to single him out.
An it is also not only very low quality journalism, but deliberate misinformation not to mention that Lützerath represents the end of coal mining in the region and instead putting it into the context of an alleged reopening of coal mines.
Just one datapoint: this war has motivated me to make at least this house as independent of external energy sources as possible within the limits of physics and my budget. Gas prices have gone up so far and so fast that freestanding houses are listed for sale all over the place here. I've installed a relatively large amount of solar (nominally a bit over 10 KW) and I'm using that to offset the gas bill as long as we have netmetering (essentially this allows us to use the grid as a battery). A relatively small air-air heatpump is providing auxiliary heat on really cold days to help limit the gas consumption. A larger one will be installed this year to help increase the self consumed portion of our generated energy so that when the netmetering days come to an end (projected: 1/1/2025) we'll still be able to use that energy efficiently and without the use of batteries.
For us the subsidies never came into play (they have always been maxed out and besides the payback time is short enough that I don't think subsidies should be there at all), but the war certainly did.
Finally, dropping the temperature a bit also really helped, unfortunately people have different comfort levels so this is a bit of an issue but by keeping one part of the house at a slightly higher temp everybody gets theirs and we still save a bundle.
I did the IR picture thing, ran the numbers, and decided that the biggest ROI was to install panels, the house was already quite well insulated by the previous owners. But we are due for a refresh on all of the window frames + windows, those are definitely getting a bit old.
If you seal properly you need mechanical ventilation. I'm not saying you're implying you don't, a lot of people around me forget such things and end up with very unhealthy living environments.
We remodeled to tight envelope + radiant heat but our architect failed to spec fresh air ventilation. We had to DIY it mid remodel and learned a lot in a hurry.
The one room that we didn’t get any fresh air flow to, now stinks. The others are fine.
In a nutshell: blow fresh air into bedrooms / closets. 10 CFM is enough (small cpu fan level of airflow). Exhaust with quiet bathroom fans on constantly at low CFM. In + out = flow. Rooms with no flow = stinky, musty, germ contamination, good for growing mushrooms, bad for people and pets
No, we live in a mild climate so the cost of ERV outweighs the benefit for us. I researched it, but balked at the high price of the unit, and the idea of adding lots of ducting in the attic.
Instead went with separate AC Infinity (grow-room) fans each pulling air through a filter. Works ok. Still iterating tbh.
This all predates the war. Another factor for us was wildfire smoke
I wish I could do the same but I live in an apartment. Very thankfully, my complex put solar panels on absolutely all of their roofs at least.
I’ve taken to re-terming oil as “conflict fuel” myself. It literally empowers the Wests enemies against the West. Don’t burn fuel, don’t fuel conflict. There’s also the resource curse of being an oil baron nation.
And to anybody shaming the West-it has a good history of live and let live with the option to opt-in by being various amounts of agreeable to it. Stephen Kotkin makes this argument well so I’ll point people towards him instead of rehashing it here.
> I’ve taken to re-terming oil as “conflict fuel” myself. It literally empowers the Wests enemies against the West. Don’t burn fuel, don’t fuel conflict.
FWIW, this has nothing to do with the fuel itself - the highest density energy sources are natural source of conflicts, and conflicts themselves are naturally fueled by whichever energy source has the optimum balance of energy density, operational safety and logistics load.
The whole phrasing reminds me of an excellent old videogame, Original War[0]. The premise here being the US trying to take ownership of some magic nuclear fuel found on USSR-controlled land, by sending a force back in time to prehistorical era, in order to dig all the magic fuel up and move it to what will, two million years later, become USA territory. Without spoiling too much, the game starts with the main protagonist and his team landing in the tropical Siberia, only instead of meeting a mammoth, they find themselves being shot at by the Soviets.
Those first few minutes of the game introduced a minor but memorable plot point: the angry Soviets from alternate timeline landed earlier than the US, and were smart enough to immediately take over whatever fossil fuel deposits they could find, forcing the Americans to use their technological edge and retool their war machine to run on renewables. For a good chunk of the US campaign, you order solar-charged, battery-powered combat vehicles into battle against Soviet gas guzzlers, fighting to secure ownership of a rare nuclear fusion catalyst.
Point being, the "conflict fuel" will always be 1) the fuel that's powering societies around the globe, and 2) whatever is most practical for the military to use. In 20-30 years, 1) could easily change from oil to renewables (read: rare earth elements, or land near the equator, or whatever else is the bottleneck in scaling up energy production) or nuclear fuel.
Good insulation (floor, ceiling and all walls) and properly fitting doors and windows already goes a long way. My apartment was renovated this way and when you turn the heating on when you come home the place is up to temp very quickly.
A lot of houses have badly fitted windows & doors. Put your ear near it and clearly hear sounds coming in through little gaps, or even feel a small air current.
When you can design from scratch it is so much easier to make an efficient home. But where I live new construction is next to impossible because of the permitting requirements which can take years to complete, so unless you have lots of time and a plot of land already zoned as residential and approved for building you will be in the queue forever.
In almost the entire EU and especially here in the UK, governments have stepped in to spend huge amounts subsidising energy (including gas), SPECIFICALLY AND EXPRESSLY to that people don't use any less. As someone with decent insulation and solar panels etc, this was exactly the time those investments should have paid off and for other people to be left behind because they refused to take basic measures. Instead they've been bailed out and progress has been put off for another decade. And this sums up the whole of our green policy for the last 40years: we absolutely must do something, unless people don't want to, which they don't.
> in the UK, governments have stepped in to spend huge amounts subsidising energy (including gas), SPECIFICALLY AND EXPRESSLY to that people don't use any less
No.
The government stepped in because poor people (and many not so poor) could not afford to heat their homes over winter.
It is (was) an emergency measure. The transition to green energy is well under way in the UK, regardless of temporary subsidies.
In the UK, they capped the price of energy per kWh. So they bailed out everyone, rich, poor and middle alike. And the more energy you used, the more support you got. So richer and more wasteful households got the MOST support.
Saying "but the poor" while throwing money at the rich is pretty self-contradictory IMHO. If they'd at least made cash payments, even if it was the same per household, it would at least have incentivised people not to waste energy. But no, it specifically rewarded people for increasing their consumption.
> So richer and more wasteful households got the MOST support.
I do agree the implementation of the scheme was very poor.....
....the reasons for which are down to our current governments unfortunate mix of poor competence and fruity ideology (thank $Deity Liss Truss wasn't around for too long!)
This is partially a consequence of the bonkers way in which electricity is priced in the UK: it's costed based off of fuel prices rather than the cost per unit to produce the power in question. This leads to situations where the UK might have plenty of electricity being produced by means other than natural gas (such as renewables), but it's still all costed as if it were produced by natural gas.
And yes, some kind of flat cash payment that advantaged poorer people would've been better. And much as I loathe the Tories, I doubt they took the route they did because they wanted to give money to the rich in this case, or even encourage electricity usage growth. Assume incompetence before malice: they needed to do something to staunch the flow, and a price cap per unit was something they could do there and then without engaging extra bureaucracy, which a cash payment would've required.
The energy cap was already in place in the UK. It contributed to the problems as the price of gas spiked.
It's a bad policy, but it's from the same government that paid people to eat out at restaurants during a viral pandemic, rather than a specific response to the war.
I'm not sure about here in the EU, but the UK has a cost of living crisis such that millions[0][1][2] are regularly skipping meals. People in that situation don't have the spare money be able to install PV or upgrade their insulation.
It's unfathomable to me that people in the UK are skipping meals. If you buy rice & beans in bulk you can fill your belly for less than £1 I'm sure.
Quick look on the Tesco website
- bread: £0.39 £0.05/100g
- chicken soup: £0.60 £0.15/100g
- 1KG rice: £0.48 £0.48/kg
- Baked beans: £0.50 £1.19/kg
- Kidney beans: £0.59 £2.46/kg DR.WT
- Tinned mackerel: £0.85 £0.97/100g DR.WT (sardines are half the price)
- Eggs: £0.20 / piece
- 500g pasta: £0.41 £0.82/kg
People are probably just used to eating take-out or buying £8 microwave dishes for the whole family and don't know how to cook on a budget.
If you're really desperate, markets usually put aside vegetables that are too old to sell but you can make soup out of them no problem.
This all isn't very appealing or even healthy (although compared to microwave or takeout ...), but at least you're not going hungry.
If you can only send your kid to school with 1 slice of bread, you have other problems than money.
Someone posts this comment every time the subject is mentioned; someone else posts the Orwell essay from the 1940s which replies to the exact same discussion; and yet the kids are still turning up hungry. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/nov/03/expand-fre...
> It's unfathomable to me that people in the UK are skipping meals.
It is when you consider many people simply don't know how to cook simple, healthy food. Our schools no longer teach basic cookery (and many parents neglected to pass on the skills).
Regarding supermarket prices, I've done the same calculations and even made a game of it when I was at university[0].
Per calorie you can do similar with value brand digestives.
However, so far as I can see in the reporting, many people in the UK really are that short of money — It's not just not being able to budget right (dyscalculia is a thing, but not common enough to explain current observations by itself).
I also think that, just as pubs are required to supply free water on request[1], they should also supply free unflavoured lentils-and-rice on request, given how cheap it is.
> If you can only send your kid to school with 1 slice of bread, you have other problems than money.
They do indeed have other problems than money — money is also a problem, just not the only one.
I was going to add that a significant number can't even manage as much as one slice of bread, however all the news I can find specifically about schoolkids skipping specifically breakfast (and not the generic mass hunger I previously gave examples of) turned out to be reporting the same two studies by two different foods companies so I don't trust that factoid.
[0] 20 years ago: breakfast was Quaker oats with skimmed UHT, sugar, and whichever dried sultanas or raisins was cheaper; skipped lunch; dinner was Chinese instant noodles from Lidl at 13p per pack; total daily was about 50p. I could sustain this without feeling bad for 12 days out of 14, with cheese on toast the other two. My dad commented that I seemed to have lost weight by the end of term, so I'm not convinced that was genuinely sustainable despite feeling like it at the time.
[1] I'm told the law is more complicated, but in practice this is observed
It's possible to have 0 dollars after paying other bills before your next grocery shopping trip so no matter how cost effective these things are they won't help. Once you're behind on rent or mortgage and gas bills and electricity bills and loan payments and credit card debt is racking up 20% interest and you're using every cent you have to stop those creditors from coming after you your only option is to cut down on other costs, even if they are relatively important, like food.
In my experience, the average British person has no idea how to cook a square healthy meal that is also appetising enough for them to choose it over other easier options. Cooking is taught poorly (if at all) in schools and at home.
This isn't about money. We have 64% of the adult population overweight and obese, 22% at age 5, and 37% at age 10. All those numbers are growing.
The excuse often brought up is that it's "expensive to eat healthy". Absolute bollocks. It's far more expensive to eat ready-meals, order takeaway, and dine out than to buy ingredients and cook.
For snacks, a banana costs £0.15 and fills you up for longer than a £1.00 chocolate bar. But people want the chocolate bar!
I've lived in a city centre apartment block for the last few years. The frequency with which I've seen the people around me having McDonalds, burgers, pizzas, and other oily, salty, high fat, high calorie food delivered shocks me. For some people, it's upwards of 5 times a week!
If you go to a "local" or "express" supermarket, microwavable ready meals and junk food represent most of the aisles, and when you take a glance at the shopper next to you, they are buying mostly junk and inconvenience food.
If you go to a supermarket after school closing time, you'll see tens/hundreds of kids buying energy drinks (despite the age limit), multipacks of chocolates, biscuits, sweets, crisps, 1 litre bottles of pop. Evidently, they have the money for it (from their parents). University students across the country keep fast food and takeaways in business via their student loans and grants.
When people here do cook, it's:-
1) Stir fry
2) Spaghetti Bolognese
3) Pasta and sauce dish
4) Something on toast/jacket potato
Every meal that gets microwaved in my office for lunch is one of these 4 things. Basically just throwing a bunch of stuff in a wok and mixing for 10 minutes.
This is of course all anecdotal, but it's plain as day that it's about personal choice for many people, and not money. Our country has a serious problem with food and alcohol addiction, and an extreme aversion to exercise. Most people would wipe out their life savings/all of their income to eat slop as much as possible, at the detriment to their finances and health.
Every stage of British life, from infanthood, primary and high school, to university and beyond prepare the population for gorging on high energy, salty, oily junk food.
We will easily hit 75% overweight/obesity by the end of the decade.
My solar panels were free, I got them in 2021. The local council installed them. They came the same week I applied and were really pleased to do it because they were under pressure as they're meant to get X household a month to hit an annual target and were badly behind.
(there is now an income limit which I disagree with but whatever...)
I told my neighbours and enthusiastically recommended them.
They "weren't sure". Here we are 2 years later and they're concerned about energy prices.
The problem here is not and should not be money. I'd be all for free insulation, solar panels, better boilers, etc. And we rightly already do all that.
Then people say no because doing things is scary and why bother when you'll just be bailed out? That's the "small-c conservative" mindset we need to get out of. It causes 101 other social issues too but now I am just ranting.
I hope the link above inspires others to get them too
If there is excess it goes back to the grid. I looked at a battery pack etc (more for reliability than profit...) but it didn't seem economically viable. I think if I had a wind turbine or if they keep cutting the feed in prices it would be?
Stupid question: But were does a normal citizen buy redox flow batteries? I googled far and wide, and those are just not sold in my area to end consumers (germany). Has somebody else a website were you can order those? I can order normal battery packs just fine, but the chemical storage ones (https://redflow.com/) are vannishing into silence here in germany, for unknown reasons.
They have infinite loading cycles, they are rather bulky, basically a fluid medium is charged and discharged. This allows for the storage capacity to easily scale (the generator remains, the tanks increase).
In addition the storage fluid can be rather friendly substance from a environment perspective (some use drinkable salty water). And cheap. And if you have a old pool or a old oil tank in your house you are basically halfway there regarding installation. Its basically chemical storage of energy, allowing for the (re)use of preexisting installations.
I don't think I've ever seen them aimed at the retail market?
The downside of flow batteries is that they're no longer solid state - they have mechanical pumping elements that require maintenance. I've only ever heard them discussed in the context of grid or industrial sized units, where the value provided by scale is enough to make the servicing economically worthwhile.
Which chemistry manages to use drinkable water for storage?
They're usually the size of a shipping container and up, aren't they? I thought they only started being cost-effective once the electrolyte containers reached a certain size.
Such batteries are not really marketed. The economic case for them relies on the market for lithium being saturated — but the market is not saturated. You can't make a profit selling lithium alternatives when we're not presently close to being out of lithium, even if we might hit a supply crunch at some point.
Gelion in Australia makes a zinc-bromine battery with an 87% RTE per their IPO filings. I've been watching them closely, but I've been hesitant to invest in a company whose products probably have years before they're in serious demand. Most flow batteries are well below 87% RTE.
Just kind of a pity that some of the most productive farmland in the world now resembles the surface of Mars, along with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced.
If you wanna have your mind blown, start looking into who bought up a lot of that farmland (and agricultural enterprise) starting after the 2014 uh, government restructuring. Hint: it’s not the Ukrainians. And they were changing laws to allow more foreign takeover of Ukrainian agriculture by multinationals all the way up to the invasion.
You could have posted that directly instead of making very vague insinuations that no one can source by themselves unless they already know what you're talking about
That’s why I suggested folks start looking into it. I was actually interested in investing into Ukrainian farm land over a decade ago but decided against it after a little due diligence (the land ownership and consolidation was too complex and too much corruption despite basement bargain land prices).
Even the article you posted admits they're relying on a technicality:
>in 2014 Cargill did buy a 5% share in UkrLandFarming, one of the largest landholders in Ukraine
>Despite the moratorium on private land transfers, more than two million hectares — or about 7,700 square miles — of land have ended up being controlled by foreign companies through leases, Mousseau said. The largest investors are companies from Cyprus, the U.S. and the Netherlands.
The intersection between non-absurd[0] conspiracy theories, culture wars and journalism never ceases to amaze me.
The article you linked thoroughly debunks the claim that "Zelenskyy sold 17 million hectares of farmland to U.S. corporations". Fine, except I imagine it's not really what anyone repeating it was interested in.
The "Zelensky", "sold", and "17 million" bits are minor details that don't change the thrust of the claim, which is that US interests control huge amounts of farmland in the Ukraine. This presumably happened just before the war and means that the US... something something, blah blah - I'm not interested in pursuing this further, as I doubt there's anything insightful to discover there. But my point is, the article focused on debunking the details and called the claim false, even though it actually proved the core of the claim true.
"Zelensky sold 17 million hectares" may not be precisely equivalent to "western corporations took control of at least 3 million hectares", but it still barks up the same tree. But instead of exploring the more accurate version of the claim to see if it leads anywhere interesting, we just have one group sharing the spiced up pop version, the other debunking the irrelevant details of it, and both being smug about how superior they are to the idiots on the other side.
Smh.
--
[0] - I.e. ones not involving aliens, the Illuminati, reptilians, etc.
Family farms are inherently inefficient compared to what a large corporation can achieve. The costs of the machinery necessary to work the land efficiency requires some minimum acreage to become cost effective. Under that threshold, "family farmers" need to either rent equipment seasonally, own and maintain older equipment, or lease their land to those with equipment in exchange for a cut of the harvest.
It's been like this for a while, in the USA at least. I remember growing up it was common for people to lease out the land near their homes. Every season, you'd see combines driving down the roads from one patch of land to the other. People who farmed the land themselves typically did so for fun.
> If you wanna have your mind blown, start looking into who bought up a lot of that farmland (and agricultural enterprise) starting after the 2014 uh, government restructuring. Hint: it’s not the Ukrainians. And they were changing laws to allow more foreign takeover of Ukrainian agriculture up to the invasion.
I'm not sure I understand the comment. Is what you're presenting negative?
Agriculture has been owned by global multinational corporations for decades. It's a free market.
You think the Dutch state owns farms? No it's banks.
Ukraine opened itself up to foreign investment and small family run farms are swallowed up. Happened everywhere and now it's happening in Ukraine.
War runs on oil. While the war continues we will be wasting a lot of petroleum powering tanks, trucks, drones and planes... All so we can kill each other. Pretty much the worst thing for the environment.
The article's conclusion may be distasteful to some, but is in line with historical precedent. The 1973 Yom Kippur war and following oil embargo led to fuel economy standards, CFL research was started, search for alternate fuel sources and extraction method such as fracking... Many parallels to today, except "green" sources barely existed at the time.
Unfortunately, conflict is an unsightly yet integral part of how humans progress. When the conflict becomes violent, the stakes become high enough to force us to do something drastic. I guess it's like that probably untrue idea of boiling a frog alive.
I don't have any reference but I expand it from any war to any crisis. Ask for a new server at work and you are ignored for years until the old server crashes and cannot be recovered. Suddenly they will be funding for new server and approvals done within the hour. It is sad humans too often need a crisis to realise what is important and focus on it. No crisis no focus everyone just pulling in different directions.
That makes a lot of sense though, to the point of being tautological. When something is a crisis, i.e. an urgent problem, you deal with it. If it's not urgent, it can wait.
The fact that it would very often be "cheaper" or more efficient to deal with any individual problem ahead of time somewhat loses it's appeal when you consider the huge amount of potential problems that are costly to even evaluate as to the benefits of dealing with them in advance.
Incentives shape human action, but can't force us to break the laws of physics. When a certain type of person rejects emergence in economics as cruel right-wing ideology, but embrace it for promoting scientific progress, the tribal blinders become laughably clear. "The Black Plague was good because it lead to the Renaissance!" See? Anyone can retroactively find a way to justify or defend the merits of an event. It's not clever and (speaking personally) I find it to be an antihuman elitist view that can only be taken by those who see themselves as outside of or above history.
A slight confounding factor here is that the green energy transition has been snowballing anyway.
Just as the bad news about climate often uses the "faster than expected" cliche, the renewables stories are often about updates to predictions because they are higher than previously estimated.
It would be easy to assign that increase to any big event that had just occurred. I do notice some changes that I attribute to the war, but it's only pushing at an open door. On a global scale how much does it compare to solar being the cheapest form of energy and other technical, industrial and political progress decades in the making? I'm not sure I see any direct link for EV success. More that all the big manufacturers (with Japan as a weird outlier) with government connections being on board at last and FUD being dispelled.
230 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadThere, I fixed the title.
Recently, there was an HN thread about large amounts of UK wind curtailment. The largest battery storage system in Europe just went live to provide grid services that’ll negate the need for natural gas to provide those services, while reducing wind curtailment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358795
https://www.energy-storage.news/europes-largest-transmission...
A secondary role for LNG is to power gas peaker plants when renewables fall short. Mainly this can be done with existing gas plants. There's very little need for building more of those. Also, coal plants remain popular for this. Before the war the plan was replacing coal with gas plants. With current gas prices, that plan is out of the window and we're now looking at increased speed of the rollout of wind, solar, and batteries instead.
> that plan is out of the window
There hasn't been officially confirmed, soon there will be a report called "Power plant strategy 2026" that will give a better outlook as to what is gonna happen this decade.
It's a highly political topic.
Blue hydrogen from LNG is more of a research topic / aspirational thing for the fossil fuel industry than it is an actual thing. This seems to be more of a talking point than something that is being done at scale with any decent capture of carbon.
LNG in the industry is of course a thing. Heating things is done with gas and coal mostly. A lot of that will have to be transitioned away to something else. Hydrogen might be an option. But some industries might also switch to other forms of heating. E.g. there are some ways to use electricity directly for this via things like induction or plasma heating. Historically, using fossil fuels was cheap. But when you are going to use vast amounts of electricity to generate green hydrogen for industrial heating use cases, this changes. Using the electricity directly might be more efficient in some cases.
Oh good, only 3,000 more of these and things should be peachy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvSmMUdC_nA
War and subsidies have turbocharged the LNG and green transition.
The IEA projects "renewables are set to account for 90% of the increase in global generation capacity" between 2022 and 2027, "almost 30% higher than the agency’s forecast in 2021."
You want actual production figures for 2027?
The claim is that while rich countries don't really care enough about the climate to seriously pursue a "green transition", many now realized that they do care about energy self-sufficiency to accelerate it. Do you disagree? Do you think the article says something different?
The Economist might as well write an article about the long-term positive impact on the planet of humans being obliterated by the nuclear war them and their neocon buddies are happy to risk.
95% of the people I've discussed this war with have absolutely no clue about the politics and history behind the current conflict and are repeating headlines they got from US corporate (propaganda) media outlets.
In another comment I did try to engage with the content and it got buried harder than this one shrug
This is like writing an article about how plant life is thriving in a field because they were fertilized by the blood of hundreds of soldiers and you're saying, "Yeah, but what do you think about the plants growing better?"
Jesus Christ people do you even listen to yourself?
You're shocked because the information you have about the situation is wrong and incomplete. Not that I blame anyone for that, western corporate media is a tool of the arms industry that's profiting from this war and they're good at what they do - manufacture consent for war.
In fact, Ukraine just spent years violating a peace treaty (at the behest of the western powers) and bombing ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine which is what prompted this war. I'm not going to make it my job to educate everyone on HN on 20 years of eastern European history, but if you'd like to take that upon yourself you can start by looking up the Minsk agreement and Merkel's comments on it, and Victoria Nuland on tape hand picking the new Ukraine government after a coup.
There is plenty of room to disagree with Russia's actions /and/ be informed on the history, but it wouldn't be a position of shock. That's coming from getting your education from western (corporate) propaganda.
Western propaganda pretends that the East and South of Ukraine had zero agency or will to decide its own future. This is why they called the crimean referendum a sham despite trustworthy western polls validating painfully clearly that it was accurate.
The Minsk agreements gave limited independence to the Donbass. Apparently the regimes in Kiev couldn't handle that which is why they signed the agreements and then broke them.
Care to explain how exactly the US is to blame for Putin invading Ukraine due to Ukrainians ousting Yanukovych 8 years ago?
I did in a cousin comment but no answer your question, not really, no. 95% of the time people aren't looking for information with an open mind, they're looking to argue/debate and defend their foregone conclusions that have become part of their identity and so are immutable. Carl Sagan has a lot of good commentary on this problem.
What we have seen is evidence and reports of Russians committing heinous war crimes including raping and torturing civilians.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Clown_World
what do you propose doing about russia invading ukraine, besides war?
Also, what is it? is russia 100% incompetent, or is it a fiendish foe? We have had to hear for a year now about how russia is so totally inept that ukranian farmers are victorious against them using nothing both farming tractors, but at the same time the west must send ungodly amounts of money and material their way, and there is no victory. Which one is it?
It seems the west is willing to fight to the last ukranian.
I just dont see how the west meddling here is gonna make any outcome better. So far nothing indicates I am wrong.
And it's Ukraine itself that wants their territories back, including Crimea and Donbass. Making it hard to negotiate. But also understandable, once you start giving in, you're giving Russia an incentive to do it all over again and capture now territory.
Not just Russia. If Russia succeeds, China is invading Taiwan next, and the whole global economy is grinding to a halt because like 80 % of world semiconductor industry is there.
Saving Ukraine means saving the world.
They'll sneak their way in just like they're rapidly expanding their influence in Africa, buying European ports and airports etc. Their tactics are completely different and our response must be as well. Of course long-term planning is the biggest weakness of democracies and the CCP's strength. So I doubt we'll be able to prevent it.
The way Xi screwed the pooch on Hong Kong, something Beijing was without controversy entitled to, looks more like an impatient dictator than the China of decades prior.
However his life is finite and I wonder if he wanted some legacy. Similar to the reason why Putin attacked Ukraine.
"The west" isn't fighting unless you mean "the west" = Ukraine and nothing else.
The west sending weapons reduces the amount of Ukrainians who are killed by Russians or under Russian occupation.
This is unambiguously a good thing.
Here: https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum.... Russia already lost about half of its entire available land forces.
It's going to be a long war, though. It's effectively been running for a decade already.
Assuming China will attack Taiwan in the meantime, which I think is a lot more likely than not, it seems the world is looking at a lot of war indeed, perhaps even global. Even more senseless killing while issues like the climate and global poverty will lose the little relevance they have now. The future seems really sad.
The future seems sad yes, but this situation didn't appear out of nowhere. The dragon seed in Russia (and China) has been growing for decades.
but maybe they're actually not? if they're losing, this is how it'll be reported to you: they're winning -> they're winning -> they've nearly won -> *silence for years* -> ukraine is now part of russia, bringing the decades-long quagmire to an end.
Aside from arming Ukraine for a decisive victory what do you propose the rest of the world do?.
recall that i was responding to someone saying that anti-war folks are actually pro-genocide and anti-west. so, from the anti-war perspective, if what you want is peace, (which is what anti-war means), then "arming ukraine for a decisive victory" is what, exactly? it's giving ukraine weapons, or, to put it in other words: it's giving money to weapons manufacturers.
if you think giving money to weapons manufacturers will lead somehow to peace, then i don't know what to tell you.
you could shorten the war by aiding russia, but obviously no one wants that. that would genuinely encourage violence, like when the united states aids saudi arabia against the people of yemen.
since the rest of the world can't make choices on russia's behalf, the only thing to be done, from an anti-war perspective, is to mitigate the damage russia does to ukraine, and encourage, through non-violent means, a cessation of violence.
arming ukraine is the opposite of that.
what else could the united states do? (or whatever country, i'll just go with the united states for the sake of brevity.) the united states could invade ukraine too, to counter russia. would that end the russia-ukraine war? no, it would just start the america-russian war.
all i'm trying to convey is that anti-war people are, probably, for the most part, actually just that. conversely, if you're pro-ukraine, or anti-russia, or anti-ukraine, or pro-russia, you are, probably, for the most part, actually not anti-war. you have other priorities, which is your business, not mine. but i won't just be called pro-genocide by someone who's gotten themselves all worked up into a froth for war.
If you think that sitting back and doing nothing will somehow let Ukrainians have a better life then you do not know the realities of living under Russian rule.
I find it strange that this kind of appeasement and bowing to another power to let them do what they please is so popular now just like it was in WW2.
Appeasing the fascists didn’t work then and it work now, the thing that stops countries like Russia is military defeat.
A question I pose to these people- after Ukraine what other land is Putin allowed to grab?
Just how inhuman can you people be?
What happens when ukraine runs out of soldiers to carry the shit we send there? will YOU take their place? just how inhuman can you be, after all? and if russia wins, how many died that wouldnt have needed to. how inhuman can we be then? or is it then fine that they died?
It might work for your conscience but if we put either of you in charge the outcome for those 40 million people is functionally the same. Distinct maybe, different no.
It's not worth dying for NATO membership or an ukrainian Crimea. And nobody should be forced to fight in any war.
It is about cost/benefit.
If Ukraine would tell: We are looking for a compromise (no NATO membership, Crimea belongs to Russia, ...), I could change my mind and support them.
If Russia would invade another country there's a new cost/benefit ratio.
And I think Russia will not invade any western country. I live in Germany and I'm not scared of Russia. They (Soviet Union actually) left East Germany peacefully.
This is truer then you know, the world must make the cost of Russia trying to take over another country so expensive both financially and militarily that they do not try this again.
Don't forget Ukraine is not the first, Russia has invaded and sometimes even entirely annexed countries in the past.
> If Ukraine would tell: We are looking for a compromise (no NATO membership, Crimea belongs to Russia, ...), I could change my mind and support them.
Ukraines mere existence is what upsets Russia, it's the reason for this war. It has nothing to do with Crimea and nothing to do with NATO.
Russia wants all of Ukraine, they want to subjugate them completely.
"Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new government in Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow, making it clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a functioning state before he would allow it to become a Western stronghold on Russia’s doorstep."
This is happening now.
"Russia wants all of Ukraine, they want to subjugate them completely."
I don't think so. Russia annexed the territory it really wants. If Ukraine demilitarizes they would make a deal.
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-t...
How can you possibly make a lasting deal with a country that wipes their arse with international agreements when it’s no longer convenient for them?.
If you think a “deal” with Russia would do anything other then let it rearm itself and reinvade the rest of the country I have a bridge to sell you.
After all, Russia already promised to never invade Ukraine and to never never threaten the sovereignty of Ukraine in exchange for them giving up their nukes.
How well did that “deal” go for Ukraine?.
> I don't think so. Russia annexed the territory it really wants. If Ukraine demilitarizes they would make a deal.
Then you haven’t been listening to what the Russians have been openly saying on tv themselves.
The Russians are very open about how Ukraine is a fake state, how it is a mistake and how its cultural identity should be destroyed.
There's propaganda everywhere and it is hard to get the real picture.
I checked the Russia/Ukraine Peace negotiations of 2022 (Wikipedia). Russia seemed to be interested in striking a deal. (1)
And I agree: a deal makes no sense if you can't trust your adversary.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_pe...
-- Actually I'm not capable getting the official position of Russia towards negotiations. For example I can't parse this statement of Peskov:
https://tass.com/politics/1577411
I meant "western" geographically here.
I'm sure Russia won't invade the Baltics.
But I'm not sure that Russia will never invade Azərbaycan. (Azərbaycan has oil and is not in NATO and frome time to time they attack Armenia or Armenia attacks Azərbaycan).
I remember the second (Putin's) war in Tschetschenia. I've known since 20 years that Russia/Putin is ruthless.
How to deal with Russia? I actually opt for appeasement and containment.
Ie repeating the steps that led to the current war (and a couple of previous ones). You expect a different outcome next time?
You can't fight it down completely, because of nukes. You can't destroy Russia's military industry.
I would treat it as a smaller and lighter version of the Soviet Union. NATO did not interfere in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland back then. These countries are free now which is great.
Countries like Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan should try not to poke the bear and should not gamble that NATO will bail them out.
This is bad. Maybe it will get better with smart politics but it sure get's worse with bad politics.
1) Most startup people are just evil
2) HN is heavily controlled by Russia
The latter is pretty obvious (we're talking English discussion platform where you can create account in ten seconds with no verification and I'm not sure if there's any anti-bot measures).
The former ... most programmers are rich and they are convinced they are rich because they are awesome instead of lucky. Most programmers aren't very social or have emotional intelligence. Most programmers think they are better than others and are prone to "fuck you, got mine" thinking. And look how many startups are based on doing extremely exploitative and illegal things - Uber with illegal cabs, Airbnb with illegal hotels, and so on. Of course those people don't give a shit about suffering.
For a second I thought you were describing the Ukrainian government bombing the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine since 2014.
1) Supply is constrained (by the war and sanctions), demand is fixed to rising, so price goes up.
2) Price goes up, so there is more demand for alternatives, including dirty ones (coal) but also green ones (solar, wind, etc).
3) Increased investment in green energy sources will make them more competitive faster than expected and thus spur the transition.
The article is worth the read. Apparently "S&P Global, a data firm, thinks emissions from energy combustion will peak in 2027, at a level the world would still be producing in 2028 had the war not happened." This isn't theorized market activity, it's actual changes in generation capacity plans made over the last twelve months.
The salient difference being the state intervention this time around. Fracking was largely private R&D.
Finally, the government provided $10 billion in tax cuts for unconventional gas drilling over the past thirty years, so even that private R&D was subsidized.
If you want a meaningful comparison it should be something like dollars per kWh.
Also, renewables were already very competitive before the war started. The added price uncertainty since then is just widening the gap. Anyone who has the option is considering putting solar on their roof, replacing their gas boiler with a heat pump, and buying an EV. Once people start receiving 1000 euro monthly bills for heating, people are going to get creative trying to fix that. Such a thing has happened this winter and people are acting accordingly.
2) Price goes up
2 a) Demand remains the same or increases (we're talking about energy so demand will always be increasing)
2 b) there is more demand for alternatives, including dirty ones (coal) but also green ones (solar, wind, etc).
3) Businesses see an opportunity for higher returns
3 a) Increased investment in fossil fuel energy sources to take advantage of the higher prices. Wells with dirtier oil that were idle are brought back online because they are profitable, higher cost extraction gears up like tar sands.
3 b) Increased investment in green energy sources to take advantage of higher energy prices.
I’m seeing more and more of a new kind type of climate denialism pop up lately, which I like to call climate optimism. A climate optimist is aware that the climate crisis is real, is caused by humans, and is an existential threat to humanity. However, they claim that the worst of the climate crisis has already been solved with technology and capitalism. I.e. they think that the current and developing technology solution will prevent more climate disasters and now it is just up to the free market to apply it. In other words, there is nothing more that governments must do but to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry (sometimes natural gas is excepted). A prime example of a climate optimist is the youtube channel Kurzgesagt. But I see this a lot from people that like to cite Our World In Data.
This is climate denial because it completely ignores global trends in carbon emissions, production capabilities, infrastructure rollout in poorer economies, etc. We are still increasing our carbon emissions (albeit at a slower rate) at a time when we needed to have stopped releasing CO2 altogether.
EDIT: After reading the article (as someone posted an archive) I see—to my surprise—that this article is not guilty of my accusations.
It makes no conclusions about the future beyond these models and does not hand-wave away climate risk at all.
You point to Kurzgesagt, and while I'm not much of a fan of them, their most recent video on climate change presents a view that the situation is dire but not hopeless, which is a healthy view to present if you're aiming to convince people to care.
What's the "appropriate" response that you'd feel okay with?
I don’t think communism will save us actually (and we don’t have time to wait for a communist revolution anyway), and forcing people to adopt veganism or pre-industrial lifestyles isn’t gonna work either. But we do have to put a limit to carbon entitled behavior. We do have to limit the number of private cars on the roads, and the amount of meat in the western dinner plate. We could have done it gradually but at this point there is no option left but a hefty carbon tax which will prove fatal to many of these industries.
What is the appropriate response I feel okay with? Not denying the severity of the situation. Claiming that we’ve solved the climate crisis is a simple lie (this article doesn’t do that by the way; I think it is important to mention that).
You say we don't have time for a communist revolution. We don't have time for any kind of revolution, because revolutions famously don't really work or improve anything. This is extra relevant because your other statements still lean on the premise of a revolution happening, just one with consequences you think are more important than communism.
As for revolutions. I don't think what I'm calling for is anywhere near to a revolution. We only have to reduce our meat consumption and our private car travels. We consumed less meat and drove less just a couple of decades ago—at the start of this mess. And today we have technology and—more imortantly—infrastructure to mitigate some of the pain of this reduction. Ideally we need to go far further but like you correctly said, we don't have time for that.
Thing is, it already did. RCP8.5 is not going to happen, because it overestimated China's current-day coal usage by 500%.
Meanwhile events like the COVID pandemic and Russian invasion ultimately prevented the world from breaking the 2019 CO2 emissions record of 40.9Gt.
I'm not saying we should sit back and relax, but perhaps it's not all doom and gloom.
This simple chain of cause and effect is oversimplified, which is why there's a whole article written about it.
At no point does the article claim "war is good because it's spurring green energy spending", or "we should have more wars to spend more on green energy", or "war has downsides, but upsides like increased green energy spending are worth it".
If you think that any statements that address the positive externalities of war simply shouldn't be uttered (because they glorify war, or encourage war, or whatever), then you're an idiot who thinks everyone else is an idiot.
Calling people idiots isn’t going to change people’s minds, and people hold bad opinions about things all the time for reasons that aren’t as simplistic as “they’re an idiot”.
As an example, I've encountered feminists who think that the very real issues men struggle with in America should not be discussed because the very act of discussing those issues might make some people think "hey, in some ways men are worse off then women" and this would influence those people to not support feminism. I'm not trying to pick on feminism here, it's just an example. If these feminists thought that the issues men face aren't real, or that the issues women face are so immeasurably worse as to make men's issue immaterial, that would be one thing and I would be happy to explain to them why I think they're wrong (and listen to their rebuttals). But I have no interest in engaging with someone who thinks that rhetoric can be suppressed and ignored just because it's inconvenient for them and their cause.
I do read the anger though, but I feel it's not the destructive kind, more the disappointed at the state of public discourse.
Instead it pretends it has significant upsides that are based upon a spurious theory.
Realistically renewables require an intense amount of capital that this war has suddenly made a lot more expensive. This will hamper green energy investment - older plants will be kept running for longer, new green energy plants won't get built. This will not be good for green energy.
The article is just a slightly less crass form of war cheerleading that they probably hope will age better than their 2003 Iraq war cheerleading.
Why are IEA forecasts spurious?
> less crass form of war cheerleading
Would the article be better if it just commented on the acceleration of investment in renewables, leaving unsaid the cause of said acceleration because some readers find it distasteful?
This is one of the more surprisingly anti-intellectual threads I’ve seen on HN.
What do they have to do with the war? Renewable energy was projected to grow anyway in spite of the war because of the declining costs of renewables.
However, since they are capital intense and war made capital expensive... that'll be a drag on investment, won't it?
>Would the article be better if it just commented on the acceleration of investment in renewables, leaving unsaid the cause of said acceleration
It would be better if they were honest about the cause.
>This is one of the more surprisingly anti-intellectual threads I’ve seen on HN.
If you say so.
And now it's growing faster. Because fossil fuel prices went up. That's the article's thesis.
They were exhibiting nothing more than a purely objective opinion based upon the purest of evidence of course.
Many Russians would believe that the idea that an article like that used spurious evidence to push a pro war agenda absurd. Like being pro drowning, as you put it.
This is basement-level trolling. The Russian economy shrank last year. Its central bank just forecast between a 1% contraction and 1% growth for 2023 [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/russian-central-bank-...
A big decline in supply of fossil fuels (which is what has happened in Europe due to the war) shifts the trade-off significantly in favor of green energy. This shift can be so dramatic that it drives up the short term cost of green energy. That’s a good problem to have because it just means demand is really high, which can be solved by more investment in the supply side.
Your thesis that this would somehow reduce investment is completely backwards. You sell pickaxes during a gold rush, not before or after.
Yes, that's precisely why I said that the cost of capital going up due to war (higher interest rates) would have a dampening effect on green energy which is very capital intensive.
That's called "supply and demand in action".
The pro war argument (the Economist's) would *ignore* this facet, arguing only "fossil fuels are more expensive -> green energy will definitely be more popular".
It was quite a simple point.
If only someone looked at the rate of new and projected investment into green energy after a period of both (a) Russia invading Ukraine and (b) rising interest rates. They could write an article about it and clear up the confusion.
Which is what? What should they say about it?
You didn’t read the article because it never makes this claim. In particular, you got a foundational fact incorrect inasmuch as renewable prices are not going down. Nobody’s energy prices are. But relative to fossil fuels, on a real basis, they’ve become more competitive.
While I don't agree with the post you're replying to, the IEA has a long history of terrible predictions with renewable energy. Not sure if they've improved recently, but for the better part of two decades, they predicted negligible growth in the solar market, even after being contradicted every single year:
https://maartensteinbuch.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-...
Classic Rothchild/Agnelli Economist - never mind the 'heat or eat' struggling humans, this is really helping the 'renewable power' industrialists...
Im sure the western powers are extremely sad about the war, despite how it obviously amplifies a longstanding agenda. Coincidence, im sure.
But it's a system that President Putin, or anyone else can't withhold. Relationships change.
LNG from America ain't it.
Elsewhere it mentions 90% of new generating capacity will be renewable over the next years, but that also kind of ignores that there'll still be 10% not renewable capacity coming online and, oh yeah, India might also have new coal plants coming online in the years ahead.
This is pretty important when considering that coal is still the most common source of electricity but also that electricity is only a part of our energy needs – switching to electrified transportation, industry and heating systems will all create more demand for electricity. Seeing as we want to phase out coal we would need renewable energy to account for more than 100% of net new production and we haven't even reached that.
Even with all the speedup in the green transition happening over the past few years it still doesn't happen at close to the speed needed – in fact we're not even close to seeing the end of coal regardless of everything going on.
So no new ventures, and no cheap transportation from our partners to our north. Seems like the North American industry is being starved.
The first statement is not correct and the continuation is misleading. It was not an individual descision of minister Habeck (Green party) to allow the demolition of Lützerath, but of the German federal parliament with its majority of Labour (SPD), Greens and Liberals (FDP) in the context of its Coal-fired Power Generation Termination Act ("Kohleverstromungsbeendigungsgesetz"). The previous version of the law from August 2020, enacted by a colation of the Conservatives (CDU/CSU) and Labour (SPD), provided for the demolition of five more villages and some little settlements. This was later, in March 2021, altered into its present form by a so-called guiding decision of the government (a coalition of Conservatives and Liberals) of North Rhine-Westphalia, the state in which Lüzerath is located, on which the modified federal law from December 2022 was based.
The Green Party of minister Harbeck was clearly the political force that had pushed hardest for a phase-out of coal as quickly and as extensively as possible. Of course, there are critics who believe that what has been achieved was not enough. Be that as it may, less would probably have been achieved without the participation of the Greens. For this reason it is dubious journalism to single him out.
An it is also not only very low quality journalism, but deliberate misinformation not to mention that Lützerath represents the end of coal mining in the region and instead putting it into the context of an alleged reopening of coal mines.
For us the subsidies never came into play (they have always been maxed out and besides the payback time is short enough that I don't think subsidies should be there at all), but the war certainly did.
Finally, dropping the temperature a bit also really helped, unfortunately people have different comfort levels so this is a bit of an issue but by keeping one part of the house at a slightly higher temp everybody gets theirs and we still save a bundle.
New solar installs or heaters would then be considered.
The one room that we didn’t get any fresh air flow to, now stinks. The others are fine.
In a nutshell: blow fresh air into bedrooms / closets. 10 CFM is enough (small cpu fan level of airflow). Exhaust with quiet bathroom fans on constantly at low CFM. In + out = flow. Rooms with no flow = stinky, musty, germ contamination, good for growing mushrooms, bad for people and pets
Instead went with separate AC Infinity (grow-room) fans each pulling air through a filter. Works ok. Still iterating tbh.
This all predates the war. Another factor for us was wildfire smoke
I’ve taken to re-terming oil as “conflict fuel” myself. It literally empowers the Wests enemies against the West. Don’t burn fuel, don’t fuel conflict. There’s also the resource curse of being an oil baron nation.
And to anybody shaming the West-it has a good history of live and let live with the option to opt-in by being various amounts of agreeable to it. Stephen Kotkin makes this argument well so I’ll point people towards him instead of rehashing it here.
FWIW, this has nothing to do with the fuel itself - the highest density energy sources are natural source of conflicts, and conflicts themselves are naturally fueled by whichever energy source has the optimum balance of energy density, operational safety and logistics load.
The whole phrasing reminds me of an excellent old videogame, Original War[0]. The premise here being the US trying to take ownership of some magic nuclear fuel found on USSR-controlled land, by sending a force back in time to prehistorical era, in order to dig all the magic fuel up and move it to what will, two million years later, become USA territory. Without spoiling too much, the game starts with the main protagonist and his team landing in the tropical Siberia, only instead of meeting a mammoth, they find themselves being shot at by the Soviets.
Those first few minutes of the game introduced a minor but memorable plot point: the angry Soviets from alternate timeline landed earlier than the US, and were smart enough to immediately take over whatever fossil fuel deposits they could find, forcing the Americans to use their technological edge and retool their war machine to run on renewables. For a good chunk of the US campaign, you order solar-charged, battery-powered combat vehicles into battle against Soviet gas guzzlers, fighting to secure ownership of a rare nuclear fusion catalyst.
Point being, the "conflict fuel" will always be 1) the fuel that's powering societies around the globe, and 2) whatever is most practical for the military to use. In 20-30 years, 1) could easily change from oil to renewables (read: rare earth elements, or land near the equator, or whatever else is the bottleneck in scaling up energy production) or nuclear fuel.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_War
A lot of houses have badly fitted windows & doors. Put your ear near it and clearly hear sounds coming in through little gaps, or even feel a small air current.
This video is from a guy who's had one built with factory built R-35 walls:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3NVDqH39CE
Our homes need fresh air, and heat exchangers are an excellent way of maintaining a comfortable temperature while allowing for fresh air to circulate.
No.
The government stepped in because poor people (and many not so poor) could not afford to heat their homes over winter.
It is (was) an emergency measure. The transition to green energy is well under way in the UK, regardless of temporary subsidies.
Saying "but the poor" while throwing money at the rich is pretty self-contradictory IMHO. If they'd at least made cash payments, even if it was the same per household, it would at least have incentivised people not to waste energy. But no, it specifically rewarded people for increasing their consumption.
But is there any evidence that's been the case, that people have increased their consumption?
Anecdotally, I can't think of anyone I know that hasn't actively reduced their usage
I do agree the implementation of the scheme was very poor.....
....the reasons for which are down to our current governments unfortunate mix of poor competence and fruity ideology (thank $Deity Liss Truss wasn't around for too long!)
And yes, some kind of flat cash payment that advantaged poorer people would've been better. And much as I loathe the Tories, I doubt they took the route they did because they wanted to give money to the rich in this case, or even encourage electricity usage growth. Assume incompetence before malice: they needed to do something to staunch the flow, and a price cap per unit was something they could do there and then without engaging extra bureaucracy, which a cash payment would've required.
It's a bad policy, but it's from the same government that paid people to eat out at restaurants during a viral pandemic, rather than a specific response to the war.
I'm not sure about here in the EU, but the UK has a cost of living crisis such that millions[0][1][2] are regularly skipping meals. People in that situation don't have the spare money be able to install PV or upgrade their insulation.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/one-four-britons-skip-meals...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jan/26/uk-student...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/oct/18/millions-for...
- bread: £0.39 £0.05/100g
- chicken soup: £0.60 £0.15/100g
- 1KG rice: £0.48 £0.48/kg
- Baked beans: £0.50 £1.19/kg
- Kidney beans: £0.59 £2.46/kg DR.WT
- Tinned mackerel: £0.85 £0.97/100g DR.WT (sardines are half the price)
- Eggs: £0.20 / piece
- 500g pasta: £0.41 £0.82/kg
People are probably just used to eating take-out or buying £8 microwave dishes for the whole family and don't know how to cook on a budget.
If you're really desperate, markets usually put aside vegetables that are too old to sell but you can make soup out of them no problem.
This all isn't very appealing or even healthy (although compared to microwave or takeout ...), but at least you're not going hungry.
If you can only send your kid to school with 1 slice of bread, you have other problems than money.
It is when you consider many people simply don't know how to cook simple, healthy food. Our schools no longer teach basic cookery (and many parents neglected to pass on the skills).
Or more likely were never taught those skills, either.
Per calorie you can do similar with value brand digestives.
However, so far as I can see in the reporting, many people in the UK really are that short of money — It's not just not being able to budget right (dyscalculia is a thing, but not common enough to explain current observations by itself).
I also think that, just as pubs are required to supply free water on request[1], they should also supply free unflavoured lentils-and-rice on request, given how cheap it is.
> If you can only send your kid to school with 1 slice of bread, you have other problems than money.
They do indeed have other problems than money — money is also a problem, just not the only one.
I was going to add that a significant number can't even manage as much as one slice of bread, however all the news I can find specifically about schoolkids skipping specifically breakfast (and not the generic mass hunger I previously gave examples of) turned out to be reporting the same two studies by two different foods companies so I don't trust that factoid.
[0] 20 years ago: breakfast was Quaker oats with skimmed UHT, sugar, and whichever dried sultanas or raisins was cheaper; skipped lunch; dinner was Chinese instant noodles from Lidl at 13p per pack; total daily was about 50p. I could sustain this without feeling bad for 12 days out of 14, with cheese on toast the other two. My dad commented that I seemed to have lost weight by the end of term, so I'm not convinced that was genuinely sustainable despite feeling like it at the time.
[1] I'm told the law is more complicated, but in practice this is observed
This isn't about money. We have 64% of the adult population overweight and obese, 22% at age 5, and 37% at age 10. All those numbers are growing.
The excuse often brought up is that it's "expensive to eat healthy". Absolute bollocks. It's far more expensive to eat ready-meals, order takeaway, and dine out than to buy ingredients and cook.
For snacks, a banana costs £0.15 and fills you up for longer than a £1.00 chocolate bar. But people want the chocolate bar!
I've lived in a city centre apartment block for the last few years. The frequency with which I've seen the people around me having McDonalds, burgers, pizzas, and other oily, salty, high fat, high calorie food delivered shocks me. For some people, it's upwards of 5 times a week!
If you go to a "local" or "express" supermarket, microwavable ready meals and junk food represent most of the aisles, and when you take a glance at the shopper next to you, they are buying mostly junk and inconvenience food.
If you go to a supermarket after school closing time, you'll see tens/hundreds of kids buying energy drinks (despite the age limit), multipacks of chocolates, biscuits, sweets, crisps, 1 litre bottles of pop. Evidently, they have the money for it (from their parents). University students across the country keep fast food and takeaways in business via their student loans and grants.
When people here do cook, it's:-
1) Stir fry 2) Spaghetti Bolognese 3) Pasta and sauce dish 4) Something on toast/jacket potato
Every meal that gets microwaved in my office for lunch is one of these 4 things. Basically just throwing a bunch of stuff in a wok and mixing for 10 minutes.
This is of course all anecdotal, but it's plain as day that it's about personal choice for many people, and not money. Our country has a serious problem with food and alcohol addiction, and an extreme aversion to exercise. Most people would wipe out their life savings/all of their income to eat slop as much as possible, at the detriment to their finances and health.
Every stage of British life, from infanthood, primary and high school, to university and beyond prepare the population for gorging on high energy, salty, oily junk food.
We will easily hit 75% overweight/obesity by the end of the decade.
I have panels too. But I also have friends that can't pay their energy bill this month.
https://www.lbbd.gov.uk/news/2021/free-solar-panels-barking-...
(there is now an income limit which I disagree with but whatever...)
I told my neighbours and enthusiastically recommended them.
They "weren't sure". Here we are 2 years later and they're concerned about energy prices.
The problem here is not and should not be money. I'd be all for free insulation, solar panels, better boilers, etc. And we rightly already do all that.
Then people say no because doing things is scary and why bother when you'll just be bailed out? That's the "small-c conservative" mindset we need to get out of. It causes 101 other social issues too but now I am just ranting.
I hope the link above inspires others to get them too
In addition the storage fluid can be rather friendly substance from a environment perspective (some use drinkable salty water). And cheap. And if you have a old pool or a old oil tank in your house you are basically halfway there regarding installation. Its basically chemical storage of energy, allowing for the (re)use of preexisting installations.
It looks real though: https://simonhackett.com/2021/05/23/redflow-gen3-zbm/
Datasheet: https://redflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/RDF1199-Redfl...
Nothing on price
The downside of flow batteries is that they're no longer solid state - they have mechanical pumping elements that require maintenance. I've only ever heard them discussed in the context of grid or industrial sized units, where the value provided by scale is enough to make the servicing economically worthwhile.
Which chemistry manages to use drinkable water for storage?
Gelion in Australia makes a zinc-bromine battery with an 87% RTE per their IPO filings. I've been watching them closely, but I've been hesitant to invest in a company whose products probably have years before they're in serious demand. Most flow batteries are well below 87% RTE.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/VRFB-battery-energy-s...
https://www.powerinfotoday.com/hydroelectric/redflow-reduces...
Looks like the type of comment you'd find on a boomer conspiracy theorists facebook group
https://www.world-grain.com/articles/16539-ports-grain-facil...
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/7480
https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/...
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-agriculture-farmland-economy...
>in 2014 Cargill did buy a 5% share in UkrLandFarming, one of the largest landholders in Ukraine
>Despite the moratorium on private land transfers, more than two million hectares — or about 7,700 square miles — of land have ended up being controlled by foreign companies through leases, Mousseau said. The largest investors are companies from Cyprus, the U.S. and the Netherlands.
The article you linked thoroughly debunks the claim that "Zelenskyy sold 17 million hectares of farmland to U.S. corporations". Fine, except I imagine it's not really what anyone repeating it was interested in.
The "Zelensky", "sold", and "17 million" bits are minor details that don't change the thrust of the claim, which is that US interests control huge amounts of farmland in the Ukraine. This presumably happened just before the war and means that the US... something something, blah blah - I'm not interested in pursuing this further, as I doubt there's anything insightful to discover there. But my point is, the article focused on debunking the details and called the claim false, even though it actually proved the core of the claim true.
"Zelensky sold 17 million hectares" may not be precisely equivalent to "western corporations took control of at least 3 million hectares", but it still barks up the same tree. But instead of exploring the more accurate version of the claim to see if it leads anywhere interesting, we just have one group sharing the spiced up pop version, the other debunking the irrelevant details of it, and both being smug about how superior they are to the idiots on the other side.
Smh.
--
[0] - I.e. ones not involving aliens, the Illuminati, reptilians, etc.
It's been like this for a while, in the USA at least. I remember growing up it was common for people to lease out the land near their homes. Every season, you'd see combines driving down the roads from one patch of land to the other. People who farmed the land themselves typically did so for fun.
Fragility, monopoly, monopsony. All things that are a net negative but still count as efficiency.
I'm not sure I understand the comment. Is what you're presenting negative?
You think the Dutch state owns farms? No it's banks. Ukraine opened itself up to foreign investment and small family run farms are swallowed up. Happened everywhere and now it's happening in Ukraine.
The fact that it would very often be "cheaper" or more efficient to deal with any individual problem ahead of time somewhat loses it's appeal when you consider the huge amount of potential problems that are costly to even evaluate as to the benefits of dealing with them in advance.
Few people know this, but that was actually the original title for "War and Peace". It was his mistress who insisted that he call it "War and Peace".
Just as the bad news about climate often uses the "faster than expected" cliche, the renewables stories are often about updates to predictions because they are higher than previously estimated.
It would be easy to assign that increase to any big event that had just occurred. I do notice some changes that I attribute to the war, but it's only pushing at an open door. On a global scale how much does it compare to solar being the cheapest form of energy and other technical, industrial and political progress decades in the making? I'm not sure I see any direct link for EV success. More that all the big manufacturers (with Japan as a weird outlier) with government connections being on board at last and FUD being dispelled.