Renewable energy covered 91% of total electricity demand in Portugal in March, according to data from the country’s grid operator, REN.
Hydroelectric energy had the largest share at 47%, followed by wind at 31%, solar at 6%, and biomass at 5%. Natural gas production accounted for the remaining share.
It is the third consecutive month that renewables exceeded 80% of total national demand, following 88% in February and 81% in January. In the first three months of this year, renewables production accounted for 89% of demand – the highest figure for the first quarter since 1978.
In 2023, renewable energy was responsible for 61% of electricity consumption in Portugal, with a total of 31.2 TWh – the highest figure ever reached in the national system. In October, Portugal’s mix was 100% renewable for an entire weekend.
Some countries are further along the path to 100% renewable energy than others.
COMBINATION OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS AND CONTINUED DEFORESTATION MAY RESULT IN SIGNIFICANT DAMAGE TO THE ANIMAL WORLD
A new study states that the combination of global warming and extreme heat events, alongside the continued expansion of deforestation in the world, may be devastating for many species of animals, especially those that know how to climb trees. As part of the study, the researchers focused on lizards and showed that following the effects of climate change, they will seek refuge from the hot ground by spending a lot of time on trees. However, due to human-related activities, such as deforestation, urbanization and the expansion of agricultural lands at the expense of natural lands, the availability of trees in the areas where the lizards live will decrease, and this may lead to the collapse of many populations.
In 2000, half of the world’s rainforest had been wiped out. If we continue the rate of destruction, the rainforests will be gone at the end of the century, according to NASA. The rate of tropical deforestation has almost doubled in 15 years. 2016 was the worst year ever with a total loss of tropical forest of 16.9 million hectares. 2017 was slightly “better” with 15.8 million hectares lost. An area almost the size of the state of Washington. On top of the disappearing rainforests, other types of forests are also being destroyed. In 2016, a world record of 30 million hectares of forests worldwide disappeared. That’s an area the size of Italy or Norway. 2017 just missed the record with a total loss of 29.4 million hectares. In just 40 years, one billion hectares of forests have been cut down worldwide. That’s an area bigger than China. The general reason for cutting down the world’s forest: The increasing world population and expanding consumer economy. The world population is growing by 215,000 people a day and the number of consumers grows by 350,000 people a day.
So,
TO FEED THE GROWING DEMAND FROM A GROWING POPULATION, TREES ARE CUT DOWN FOR:
• Fuel
• Land for housing and urbanization
• Paper
• Furniture
• Palm trees (for palm oil)
• Room for cattle ranching
Up to 75 percent of life on the planet lives in rainforests. Most of these millions of species – many still undiscovered by humans – would be wiped out if the rainforest disappeared. There would simply be nowhere else to go. Up to 75 percent of life on the planet lives in rainforests. Most of these millions of species – many still undiscovered by humans – would be wiped out if the rainforest disappeared. There would simply be nowhere else to go. It’s not only the rainforests that are disappearing. We are also running out of freshwater and fish in the world’s oceans.
FRANKFURT, Jan 3 (Reuters) – The share of renewables on Germany’s power grids rose by 6.6 percentage points to 55% of the total last year, the sector’s regulator said on Wednesday, as Europe’s largest economy moves closer to its 2030 target.
Germany wants green power to account for 80% of its energy mix by 2030. It has ditched nuclear power and aims to abandon most of its coal generation and use its remaining gas plants mostly for grid back-up.
Within renewables, offshore wind contributed a 31.1% share, solar 12.1% and biomass 8.4%, while the remaining 3.4% came from hydropower and other renewables, regulator Bundesnetzagentur said in a statement.
The 2023 rise was helped by capacity expansion as well as weather, it said.
“We have broken the 50% mark for renewables for the first time,” Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in a statement. “Our measures to simplify planning and approvals are starting to take effect.”
BERLIN, Jan 2 (Reuters) – Germany’s solar and wind power installations hit a record in 2023 but only photovoltaic energy reached the government’s targets, industry associations said, expecting continued growth this year with further reduced bureaucracy.
Germany aims to cover 80% of its electricity needs from renewables by 2030, up from 52% in 2023.
More than a million new solar power systems generating 14 GW of energy were installed in Germany last year, up 85% year-on-year, thanks to a boom in residential solar demand, putting it on track to reach Berlin’s 2030 goal, the BSW solar power association said on Tuesday.
Funny thing about 2 wheelers: they have the aerodynamics of a brick: roughly 3x worse than vehicles like a Prius. So, a typical motorbike gets about 80MPG and a Harley gets about 50MPG, while a Prius can get 60MPG and if it carries 4 people it can get 240 passenger-miles per gallon.
So 2 or 3 bikes use as much fuel as an average light vehicle, and e-bikes are very effective at reducing demand.
Another thought: e-bikes are good at eliminating liquid fuel, but a 4 wheel EV is likely to be more efficient, and be a lot safer and more comfortable. It will be cheaper than an ICE’s total cost of ownership, but of course many people in developing countries can’t even afford a used 4-wheel vehicle.
That’s the weird aspect, never tried a gas motorcycle myself but can see myself getting an eBike at some point. First time I got passed by one was on a hill climb, an elderly woman with pedal assist (which freaked me out for a sec). That’s the thing — scores of people will try an eBike that would never get near a motorcycle.
I added a midrive electric motor kit to my bike to help me get my fat old ass up and down the steep hills here in rural Tn. Rode bikes all my life and commuted for six years on one. Ebikes are great but for anyone tight on money a Honda 150 would be a much better deal. Quality ebikes cost more than a basic motorcycle and while 15 mph is my happy speed bikes are not welcome sharing the roads in America.
Nick G — a 4 wheel EV is likely to be more efficient, and be a lot safer and more comfortable.
The only reason you think single occupancy cars are convenient is that vast sums have been spent to make them that way. America in particular has torn down its cities to fit cars into them. The reason biking and public transportation are slow is mostly because cars are in the way.
It’s not an experiment that is likely to be repeated in mostly of the world. The crowded cities of Asia simply don’t have to money to wreck themselves for the benefit of the few that can afford cars.
I agree that mass transit is a great thing. I’ve spent decades riding in electric trains: quiet, safe, fast, chauffered. What’s not to like?
I hate buses, but that’s partly because they’re diesel. E-buses would be far better.
Mass transit does require fairly high population density: the primary cost is labor, which becomes prohibitive when covering 24×7 to all locations every 10-15 minutes, unless things are pretty dense. Autonomous vehicles may change that.
Europe is an bad comparison, because they prioritized passengers, and their rail freight transportation is pretty clumsy. The US, on the other hand, prioritized freight, which makes rail passenger travel slow and clumsy.
I don’t think bikes are very practical as a general solution. I biked for thousands of miles when I was young, when I was a puppy. They’re great fun & great exercise, and can be a very useful niche solution, but barriers include people with disabilities (my knee is complaining at the thought!), weather, cargo, and long distances.
I agree that we should expand public transport: we don’t have to choose one thing. But, starting where we are now, that’s a very, very slow way to reduce oil consumption. Electrification of land transportation, in all it’s various forms, is the straightforward and fast solution.
Nick —
The real problem is bonkers city design that forces people to travel long distances. Corner stores are banned almost everywhere in America, so people drive a lot.
Even so, 60% of car trips are under 10K, which is bikeable.
I’ve read this frequently, and got the same sense from your video clips. Any chance you could point towards some solid research with good data and boundary conditions that supports this? I am not suggesting either agreement or disagreement, just looking for solid analysis. The light digging I’ve done has not been satisfying.
Yeah, I’d be curious to see a really good analysis of the per capita costs of large cities versus suburbs and exurbs.
Sadly, I would be very surprised if it existed. I’ve done analysis like this comparing revenues of different units of local government, and it’s very difficult to do well. Different units of government have different kinds of taxes, levied for different reasons, and expenses are the same way.
The infrastructure costs in particular can be paid for out of your operating budget, out of your capital budget, the general fund, a special fund, via grants, overhead costs can be allocated or not, they could be amortized in different ways, underlying and long-term cost may not be recognized at all, etc. etc.
Finally, I would be surprised if infrastructure costs were the major part of the budget. Operating Cost, especially labor are likely to be bigger, than capital costs (even including maintenance) and also a very difficult to compare. Education is very expensive, so is police and fire, their costs can be recognized at multiple levels of government Including pension costs, equipment, cost, etc. There are a lot of odd variables. For instance, police departments often pay for large part of the capital budget by confiscating the assets of people accused of selling drugs.
I don’t know about subsidized as much as an artifact of plentiful and cheap liquid fuel and the room to build new subdivisions.
“suburbia is massively subsidized”
The two things that come to mind are:
1) that roads (including the national highway system and local roads) are public property: they claimed a great deal of valuable land for free (most of which was inhabited), and they don’t pay property taxes (unlike, say most rail); and
2) IIRC some publicly subsidized mortgages (FHA? VA?) were targeted at suburbia; and
3) fossil liquid fuel is cheap because of external costs which are not accounted for in the market price (at least in the US): expensive pollution; high security costs (several $trillion for Gulf Wars I and II, for instance, not to mention a large long-term military presence for the ME); and high costs of unstable supply (which is why we call it an “Oil Shock” Model – those economic shocks can cost $trillions).
Just one analysis:
“This paper provides a comprehensive global, regional, and country-level update of: (i) efficient fossil fuel prices to reflect their full private and social costs; and (ii) subsidies implied by mispricing fuels. The methodology improves over previous IMF analyses through more sophisticated estimation of costs and impacts of reform. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8 percent of GDP, and are expected to rise to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025. Just 8 percent of the 2020 subsidy reflects undercharging for supply costs (explicit subsidies) and 92 percent for undercharging for environmental costs and foregone consumption taxes (implicit subsidies). Efficient fuel pricing in 2025 would reduce global carbon dioxide emissions 36 percent below baseline levels, which is in line with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees, while raising revenues worth 3.8 percent of global GDP and preventing 0.9 million local air pollution deaths. Accompanying spreadsheets provide detailed results for 191 countries.”
It’s still against the law to convert garages into apartments, or subdivide an existing house into two dwelling spaces, creating a ” mother in law” apartment, etc, just about everywhere in the USA.
But it’s happening on the grand scale in some places anyway, with local city government being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Enforcing the regs would mean huge numbers of new homeless people, tons of property owners up in arms due to the loss of income, loss of privacy due to mother in law in the house, etc.
So they are simply ignoring the regulations in a lot of cases.
I personally foresee some dramatic changes coming in zoning regs over the next couple of decades, such that small low traffic neighbor hood businesses will eventually be the rule rather than the exception in residential areas.
Such businesses are already quite common in a lot of urban neighborhoods already. I lived in such a neighborhood once myself and worked from home, rather than renting a shop. You can do at least a third of the everyday routine work needed on cars in a single car garage if you have the tools. It takes longer but doing it still pays well.
An older lady living across the street took had a couple of dozen customers for her home laundry business, and made a couple of hundred bucks a week cash to supplement her SS check.
This isn’t going to work so well in suburban neighborhoods where the houses are on large lots because potential customers are fewer in number and farther away, but it can still work for people doing almost any sort of accounting, advertising, or one on one professional work, such as lawyers consulting individual clients, etc.
Actually, what I’m seeing in the NorthWest, is that local governments are leading the charge in changing Zoning Laws to allow ADUs to increase density and housing availability. In my town, there have been a remarkable amount of change in the last few years since the laws were changed.
California state law supersede all local zoning/planning regulation as of 1/1/21,
allowing a 1200 sq ft adu on all residential lots.
I believe a second adu is also part of the provision if it is carved out of the primary house.
“In California in 2021, 65,000 single-family home permits were approved, while around 30,000 ADU permits were submitted in 2022.
I have read that something like 18 e bikes can be produced for the same resource footprint as an EV. I have used electric recumbent trikes now for 12 years. My wife and I both put about 1500 miles each on them each summer. We average about 17 watts per miles. We typically travel 12 mph because we are on gravel roads. 16 mph on paved roads. Top end is about 25 mph. We have 16 amp hour x 36v batteries so range is very good. Lighter and slower will eventually be the keys to sustainable travel. The batteries have lasted well, more problems with the BMS in the battery packs than the batteries themselves. Putting any kind of fairing would dramatically improve efficiency. I have two mountain bikes that are electric as well, but much prefer the recumbent trikes.
An e-bike is vastly more efficient than an EV. I have used electric recumbent trikes for around 12 years now. Put 1500 miles a year in them. 17 watts per mile. I easily charge these 36v x 16 ahr batteries on my solar panel. Compare that to a Tesla. For urban use they are hard to beat. Most studies i have read suggest around 18 to 20 e-bikes can be produced for the same footprint as a single EV. Below 15mph and wind resistance is not much of a factor, A typical EV would need to carry 8-10 people to reach the efficiency of an e-bike. It is a function of mass and speed. You are very light on analysis that support your opinions. I have over 10,000 miles of experience with e-bikes and e-trikes. Comparing a Harley to a Prius and concluding 2 to 3 e-bikes use as much fuel as an average light vehicle!!! You are a joke sir, an average high school physics student can do better than that!!
These cargo delivery electric assist human powered type vehicles will be very useful in the hot world that becomes short of oil
-https://electrek.co/2023/06/23/eav-zoomo-four-wheeled-electric-cargo-bikes-replace-delivery-vans-in-cities/
-https://www.freightwaves.com/news/big-brown-is-going-small-in-test-of-e-cargo-bikes
-https://electrek.co/2022/12/11/mate-suv-electric-cargo-bike/
-https://cyclingindustry.news/amazon-turns-to-electric-cargo-bikes-for-city-delivery/
We do indeed have more Rebuildables than ever before, there is nothing renewable about solar panels, nor wind turbines, nor for that matter hydro electric dams and turbines. We can build all of these gizmos by mining, processing and transporting minerals over vast distances, all using fossil fuels. It’s just as well fossil fuels use has increased by ~34,000Twh per annum, over the last 20 years or we probably couldn’t have built the ~3,400Twh of electricity we do gain from rebuildables.
Of course companies need lots of new ‘products’ to sell people and governments so we have all these new electricity generating products, and of course batteries, that all have limited lifespans, to sell to people, in the ever increasing pursuit of ‘growth’ in the world economy..
None of it is sustainable in any way, all of it just guarantees more destruction of the natural environment and fast extinction of (currently) around 13 species per day, so that we humans, the 15% who enjoy modernity, can continue on a little longer in a lifestyle we are use to…
Tom Murphy sums it up very well, how we compartmentalise our thinking to believe in a future fantasy….
Once again, now 3 weeks in a row, I’ll ask all the usual cornucopians the same question..
The Adaro coal fired power plants and Aluminium smelters are going to be built in Borneo to supply Aluminium, that we need a lot more of (for all the new solar panels). Would it be ‘better’ if instead of using coal power, they destroyed hundreds of square kilometers of rainforest to put up solar panels, and dammed pristine rivers for the backup pumped hydro power??
This one large example is what humans are doing to the world, changing it into a world for our use, without regard to the loss of natural systems and the feedback loops (many we still don’t understand). Adaro is an Indonesian company, the workers in these plants will be local cheap labour that benefits from this development in the short term. They will be able to afford food and medicine for their families.
This question is especially aimed at you Nick G, as the ‘cheapest’ economic means of powering the Aluminium smelters is via the coal fired electricity. Doing it with solar and pumped hydro (or batteries) is vastly more expensive, even in this place of a consistent 5.5hrs of sunshine/day.
Nick G you continually espouse that solar and wind are cheaper than coal, yet the coal powered development route is going to cost $US2B, while the solar set up needed would be over $US16B, before any batteries or pumped hydro backup, while the destruction of the rainforest is just more BAU (business as usual)..
Adaro is going ahead with this project, despite the extra CO2 poured into the atmosphere, because they have a market for the Aluminium, as demand for Aluminium keeps going up, especially to build more solar panels, but car manufacturers are also increasingly using Aluminium for the body of EVs as it cuts the weight down a bit..
This is a clear example of what humanity is doing, in the illusion of building a green sustainable future, right around the world, so let’s have your answer instead of the usual deflection you give about any of the downsides of this bright green future…
In my neck of the woods people with money are putting on a marvelous show of consumption. Just up the road from me a guy that lives in Canada and has a construction company there is building a 20 story residential complex on 2,500 m2 (half an acre) of land. He plans to name it after himself.
On Monday it was a public holiday here and I saw an Audi R8 speeding down the other side of the road. Lots of young people driving big, expensive SUVs. It seems we are pedal to the metal towards the cliff. If you took away all the renewables and EVs it seems people would still want to party like it’s 1999. Nobody seems to give a shit about the stuff you’re bitching and moaning about so I’ll take any good news I can get.
In science empirical evidence always trumps theory – i.e. there is a point when a theory has to be abandoned, and not just tweaked, because it repeatedly disagrees with observations. The theory that renewables will save us from overshoot is not working out. Almost everyday somebody posts a link to the latest and greatest EV technology or to statistics about how much electricity is generated from wind and solar and yet CO2 concentrations are going up faster than ever, no oil or gas projects are being abandoned, in fact time from development to start-up seems to be shortening, coal use is growing again, ecological habitat destruction is accelerating, pollution is beyond awful, etc. Maybe it’s time to abandon the theory. Renewables have been promoted as the answer to both climate change and resource depletion; so far both these have proved to be tar babies, i.e. difficult problems that are only aggravated by attempts to solve them. The real problem is overshoot, but even that is proximal as overshoot is inevitable when a species is given enough resources to overcome environmental limits, so you could say the real problem is the nature of species and the ultimate cause is three billion years of evolution – and how is that going to be solved? Virtue and status signalling, denial of reality, short term thinking, selfishness, tribalism, obfuscation etc. are what people do, even if they are evidently idiotic in the long term, because they have worked in the past to maximise their doer’s gene’s representation in the next generations. Overall there is not going to be a move towards behaviours where genes disappear from populations (i.e. voluntary downsizing) – the first genes to go will be the very ones that cause that behaviour, which will therefore stop. The least bad solution has always been an early and as gentle as possible crash to stop overshoot, but that is the very solution that every human has evolved to fight against.
I sometimes think back to the late 70s, when I was a young “environmentalist” and geology major (that wouldn’t last) who worked at a park picking up trash, who collected aluminum cans and recycled them to pay for my books at college, who drove a used VW and rode a bicycle to work and school whenever I could, who read Thoreau and Edward Abbey and Gregory Bateson and Loren Eiseley, who voted for Jerry Brown in the 1980 presidential primary election. I continued having hope right up through November of 1984, when it was announced that Ronald Reagan had been reelected President of the US. It wasn’t just a re-election, it was a landslide. The handwriting was clearly on the wall.
There is a young guy on Twitter with the same gung-ho attitude as you had. Here is a tweet from 6 hours ago where he records day #1712 off trash pickup somewhere in the Mojave I think: https://twitter.com/edgarrmcgregor/status/1775545070281990171
Overall there is not going to be a move towards behaviours where genes disappear from populations (i.e. voluntary downsizing) – the first genes to go will be the very ones that cause that behaviour, which will therefore stop.
Genes that encourage reproduction mostly work by encouraging sex. But modern medicine has decoupled sex from reproduction. Additionally, declining infant mortality has reduced the incentive to have lots of children.
There are also economic considerations: The decline in child labor has made having children much more expensive. Meanwhile women have moved into labor markets, creating an opportunity cost for child care. And generally speaking, the better educated women are the fewer children they have, possibly because they take more control of their lives.
Human technology moves much faster than natural selection, which was initially rejected by many leading scientists because it is unimaginably slow. There’s no comparison. We are fat because sugar has gotten so cheap. We won’t evolve out of this, we’ll develop drugs to deal with it.
There are some religious nuts who think that having more babies will allow them to take over the world, but like all eugenics, this kind of idea is too short-lived to have any impact. Ideas come and go. Geneticists experiment on fruit flies because they reproduce quickly, before the grant runs out. Eugenicists die long before they can hope to see any results.
Population will decline because population growth is not really in anyone’s interest. Look at Japan, where my wife currently is, dealing with family matters. The village is dying fast. The country lost about 800,000 people last year alone. Everyone knows it, but it isn’t in anyone’s interest to do anything about it. Demagogues may rave about national decline, but that is putting groups before people, an idea that is hard to sustain.
‘The theory that renewables will save us from overshoot’
No one should harbor that ‘theory’, or expectation.
Nothing saves up from overshoot.
Nothing ‘saves’ us…not a messiah, not a prayer or a politician, and not a set of techniques.
And nothing saves the biosphere and its inhabitants other than the passage of time beyond when humans have left the scene.
NFE’s Non-Fossil Energies (formally sometimes called renewables) deployment does accomplish several things
-Can offset depleting fossil fuel. Some people think that is valuable
-Can provide energy with less CO2 emission/joule. Some people think that is a good thing
These two points are not complicated. I think most can comprehend a benefit to these things.
The next point is slightly more complicated, but important. Photovoltaics can be deployed by individuals, families, and communities at scale to provide most, or all, or even excess energy production if they live in a fairly sunny area which applies to most people of the world. This literal ’empowerment’ is a dramatic change in capability, no longer having to rely on a centralized monopoly of wealth sequestering authorities, governments or corporations.
For example, a family with an acre (43,560 sq ft) could devote less than 2% of the total area to PV and at an average site in the US produce 23.2 MWhr/y, compared to the average US household electrical consumption of 10.6 MWhr/y. Note that roughly 5 MW will get you 15,000 miles of driving.
This does not apply to those living in very cloudy areas. For those without personal space to deploy solar, you can pool your efforts with local community solar projects.
This whole debate about overshoot is one big red herring. A distraction. Defenders of fossil fuel are looking for one last excuse to keep oil & gas industry the way it is now. So, they argue that things are hopeless, so why pester the poor oppressed O&G industry? Just relax, and drill, baby drill.
They won’t admit that. They’ll claim they’re enormously concerned about the environment. But mysteriously, they don’t really want to do anything about climate change. Because, after all, fossil fuels really are the primary cause of climate change…
Anyone who claims to be concerned about overshoot should advocate for net-zero.
Anyone who claims to be concerned about climate change should advocate for net-zero.
Someone who raises concerns about overshoot or climate change, and who advocates *against* net-zero, is either recklessly negligent about informing themselves, or simply pretending concern. They may be trying to distract us all from the important questions, or simply trying to leave us too discouraged to do anything at all, but one way or the other they’re just defending fossil fuels.
Nick G, once again you fail to answer the question about building the Adaro Aluminium smelters, your constant deflection tends to indicate you are in favor of it because the world needs the Aluminium for solar panels and lighter EV car bodies.. More destruction of rainforests and burning of fossil fuels is what you are advocating with the bright green future, that’s not possible to transition to. Especially not possible for 8 billion+ humans ..
Did you bother to go and read Tom Murphy’s post on his Do The Math website??
Here is a proposition for you, we stop using all forms of fossil fuels tomorrow. Are you in favor of this? We have had solar and wind for well over 4 decades, my own first solar panel is 39 years old, and made a lot better than the newer cheaper ones, but $10/w even now doesn’t work and certainly didn’t back 1985 when $10/w was a lot of money…
Sometime tomorrow, in your city, the power will go off as no city is reliant 100% upon solar and wind power and the grid will fail or perhaps just have brownouts in different areas as voltage and frequency of the system become irregular, tripping circuit breakers all over the place.
No crews will get to reset these breakers as no fossil fuels are being used.
All food in fridges and freezers will need to be eaten quickly before it spoils, but after a couple of days, when you walk to the nearest shops, you find the shelves are bare.
Then a couple of days later after eating every skerrick of dry food in you house, you start to stave and go and try to find something to eat. Your pet pooch is starting to look delicious…
No food is getting to the city, the farmers have stopped harvesting as they don’t have any machinery that runs on non fossil fuels to gather food from paddocks. They do what they can by hand to feed themselves and family. Even if they had grain in the on farm silos, it isn’t going anywhere because there are no trucks transporting anything anywhere…
Before you start with the argument of not stopping tomorrow, but by 2040 or 2050 or whatever, remember this means ripping up a whole lot more rainforests to build Aluminium Smelters to build the world you envision. Because of cost they will burn cheap coal to produce the needed Aluminium. People and companies in Indonesia can’t afford to spend $US16-18B to buy solar panels, so will use the cheap source of energy to make the cheap Aluminium…
This is the world you are in favor of.. Burning more coal, oil and gas to build all the renewable waste (everything we build is waste after a period of time!!). Clear felling huge tracts of rainforest, sending more species extinct, to put up huge solar farms and the factories making them, and the mines mining the initial resources.. All for what end?? Another decade or so of modernity??
Once the fossil fuels are gone, so is the ability to do the mining in remote areas, and the high heat processes we use to make all aspects of modernity. We are not doing it with renewable electricity because it’s too expensive, like solar is to power the new Aluminium smelters…
What humanity needs to do is power down and reduce the massive overshoot of our population, something we should have been doing many decades ago. Massive degrowth is the only way to stop a devastating collapse that’s coming..
Business as Usual, meaning growth of any type, by any means, fossil fuels OR renewables is a guarantee of collapse..
You need to get off your high horse of assuming people against continued growth are in favor of fossil fuels. No we are not, because fossil fuels are leaving us anyway, they are a dead end, they are destroying, or already have destroyed our stable Holocene climate. Never ever have I ever said I’m in favor of fossil fuels, nor ever indicated that “drill baby drill” is an answer to anything.. Powering down and degrowth by design is the only way to prevent massive collapse, if it’s even possible because we have left it so late….
Renewable energy comes from unlimited, naturally replenished resources, such as the sun, tides, and wind. Renewable energy can be used for electricity generation, space and water heating and cooling, and transportation. Non-renewable energy, in contrast, comes from finite sources, such as coal, natural gas, and oil.
Thermal Batteries Are the Hottest New Thing in Energy Storage
By Haley Zaremba – Apr 03, 2024, 4:00 PM CDT
Thermal batteries are the latest innovation in energy storage, offering affordability and potential for decarbonization.
Thermal energy storage has the potential to contribute significantly to decarbonizing global heat and power and ensure an affordable, reliable, and efficient energy system.
Lack of publicity is the key bottleneck for industrial-scale thermal energy storage deployment.
The energy storage sector is on the verge of explosion. As leading economies around the world race to install more and more renewable energy production capacity, the nature of our energy landscape is changing, and the grid will need significant advances and infrastructural supports to keep up. One of these key supports is energy storage, which can manage and even out the variable flow of renewable energy to and from the grid. Due to its central role in energy security in an increasingly decarbonized world, the energy security sector could double in size over the course of 2024.
Huntingtonbeach, The renewable energy we use comes from man made machines called solar panels, or wind turbines. There is no electricity without these machines…
Plus the not so minor detail that coal, gas and oil are also natural energy sources that are just as free to mankind as sunshine, wind and tides…
We need to build machines to gain access to all of these energy forms to turn the energy into useful work.
To gain energy from wind turbines or solar panels requires 10 times the fully manufactured material input of coal, gas or oil machines to return a set quantity of useful energy, say 1Gwh over a short period of time. All these machines have a lifespan and must be replaced due to entropy.
Solar panels and wind turbines are exposed to the weather, making their lifetime of productive operation shorter than other machines obtaining energy from coal, oil or gas.
Solar and wind machines only give us electricity, intermittently.
Coal, oil and gas machines give us products, liquid fuels, high industrial heat and electricity.
Why is adaptability important to survival?
Without it, humans would have perished from this earth long ago. Adaptability is an evolutionary imperative: we learn, we grow, we adapt, we change, we keep moving forward – or we don’t survive as a species. The greatest challenge right now is that we’re having to do it so often and in all areas of our lives.
Why are humans so good at adapting?
Our ability to successfully adapt to such a diverse range of habitats is often explained in terms of our cognitive ability. Humans have relatively bigger brains and more computing power than other animals, and this allows us to figure out how to live in a wide range of environments.
As humans, we experience dramatically fewer hazards today than we did in our early evolution. However, genetic studies indicate that we are still evolving.
Huntingtonbeach, garbage and irrelevance to the topic..
Using more energy is what has allowed humans to grow and adapt to harsher climates. It’s always been MORE energy used, supplied by the natural world.
The future is going to be highlighted by LESS energy available to humans as we have used up the easy to get energy. Explain how humanity grows with LESS energy..
Seems to me that advocating for net-zero is a funny way to get a sense of control over a dilemna one has no control over. The global human enterprise exists in the size and configuration it has due to the sudden influx of fossil carbon energy and materials. There is no way to sustain this enterprise without fossil carbon energy. So depletion will bring an eventual reduction in inputs and reduce the size of the global human enterprise to say nothing of the downstream GHG consequences. Net zero by choice just doesn’t seem like something any animal or person would do. “No thank you, I’ve had enough horsepower, I’m fine driving my 30 hp automobile at 45 mph down the highway”. Or “Oh look, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I’ll just take one coin and leave the rest for others. I’ve never had a gold coin so one is surely more than enough”.
There is no way to sustain this enterprise without fossil carbon energy.
This is entirely unrealistic. I think you’ve been getting a perspective that’s unduly influenced by the oil industry. They naturally think that the world can only run on oil, and that Peak Oil means The End of The World As We Know It.
If oil were properly priced to include externalities, high cost oil might very well get no interest at all. Instead, oil consumption would be lower, and older, lower cost fields might well suffice. At the same time, higher efficiency and electrification of transportation would have long ago provided better and less expensive substitutes for high priced oil.
We *don’t* have a declining energy resource base. We are surrounded by an abundance of affordable energy: it’s only a question of our ingenuity in taking advantage of it. For instance, current human energy consumption is very roughly 12 terawatts. Well, the sun bathes the earth in 125,000 terawatts of continuous, very high quality energy!
The English in Roman times were surrounded by coal. Why didn’t they use it? It took time to develop the ingenuity to take advantage of it. In the same way, we’re surround by wind, solar and nuclear power. They are scalable, affordable, high energy-ROI, etc., etc. Their cost is declining quickly – they’re already affordable, and well on their way to being truly cheap, in a way that fossil fuels never truly were.
Nick G,
Once again, because you refuse to acknowledge it, oil, coal and gas are just as free to humanity as wind and sunshine. no ‘cost’ to any of them.
Humans need to build machines to harvest the energy, it’s all useless to modern civilization, unless we harness it, which takes making machines..
We need to process a lot more minerals to build the machines that harvest sunshine and wind (along with storage of energy), than we need to build machines to harvest coal, oil and gas for the same rate of work in civilization.
We build all these machines with fossil fuels. We have been building all these solar and wind machines for many decades. It has come while use of fossil fuels have increased. We are at record use of fossil fuels right now in 2024, despite all the decades of building more machines to harvest wind and sunshine energy.
If you want to ramp up production and deployment of solar and wind machines, it means more mining, more transport, more processing, all done with fossil fuels. It means more Aluminium smelters like the Adaro one’s in Borneo, burning more coal..
This is what you are in favor of, yet you don’t want to understand it, no matter how many times I explain it to you.
Nick, I’ll try again. Btw my perspective comes primarily from this community, TOD and POB.
The modern human enterprise grew to this size and configuration on fossil fuels. Yes we can build more solar/wind power generation, we have huge amounts of fat and negawatts to burn, but the mass of machinery, infrastructure and materials is fossil derived. We can change the electrical generation mix like you can vary your diet but you aren’t going to start digesting grass and wood products because your crops and animals declined in production. When the fossil energy input goes down this size of the human enterprise will shrink. Sure, all manner of accomodation will happen but the net supply will decline. And no one will be leaving accessibble energy in the ground because the demand, like your hunger continues, hour by hour.
Btw my perspective comes primarily from this community, TOD and POB.
Well, I’ve been commenting on TOD and POB for roughly 20 years(!), but most of my knowledge comes from working with this stuff, and doing general research outside these blogs.
You have to realize that TOD & POB are definitely not in the mainstream of science & engineering. Climate Change as a big risk for humanity? Definitely mainstream. Oil & FF depletion as an existential threat? Not so much.
Now, sure occasionally Galileo is right, and the mainstream is wrong. But more often than not that isn’t the case. If you’re looking at propositions that are far outside the mainstream you have to be far more cautious about accepting them without good, strong evidence. Remember the scientific rule of thumb: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The modern human enterprise grew to this size and configuration on fossil fuels… the mass of machinery, infrastructure and materials is fossil derived.
The next generation of infrastructure is built by the current generation. Oil wells were drilled by horses, and oil barrels were transported by horses as well. The few remaining contemporary horses are now transported with gas/diesel.
With time, wells were drilled and oil was transported using diesel. Some wells are already being pumped by solar power, and the last oil will be transported by renewably powered transportation.
And eventually wind and solar (and hydro, etc) equipment will be manufactured, transported and installed with renewably powered plants, vehicles and equipment.
In the long run, there isn’t anything we do now with fossil fuels that can’t be done with renewable power. Liquid fuels will still be convenient for some niche applications, but they don’t have to be derived from oil.
Hideaway
You are right on the money. A fast track to the cliff edge and the Cornucopians cannot see the wood for the trees, just big holes in the ground. iIguess that is where all the WT blades, PV panels and EV’s will finally end up.
Good luck with your challenge to provide a proof that we can rely on low cost unreliables to produce metals. Methinks we will be waiting a long time
I am just wondering when NickG and Alimibiquated are going to give us their masterclass in thermodynamics, especially Entropy. Neither managed to spot the schoolboy error in the G&R report on EV’s.
The other news of note is that Tesla’s sales were none too hot in Q1. Judging by the fall in the stock price I guess a few investors may be thinking G&R might be right.
Human individuals with a growth mindset see challenges as opportunities to learn and improve, fostering resilience and adaptability in the face of change. Embracing challenges, learning from setbacks, and viewing effort as a path to mastery are key aspects of a growth mindset that contribute to adaptability.
In evolutionary theory, adaptation is the biological mechanism by which organisms adjust to new environments or to changes in their current environment.
The Next Gold Rush: Lithium Surge Creates New Investment Opportunities
U.S. lithium companies have the opportunity to become global leaders in lithium production and accelerate the transition to sustainable energy sources. This is particularly important as the demand for lithium is increasing every year.
EnergyX is on a mission to meet U.S. lithium demands using groundbreaking technology that can extract 300% more lithium from a source than traditional methods.
Wow, is that you masterclass on entropy. Clearly tyou have no idea what you are talking about. I will give you an easy example. Try any pneunmatic tool powered by compresed air. As the stored air in the tank runs down then work is done. This is an open system. When the air tank pressure equals the atmospehric pressure no more work can be extracted from the stored energy. Entropy will increase as the tank pressure depletes.
Entropy increases with a wind turbine. Think of all that disturbed air.
You might look at the book Thermodynamics for Dummies, but it might be a bit too technical for you.
I find it rather strange that Carnot says “Entropy increases with a wind turbine. Think of all that disturbed air.”
There’s a continuous supply of solar energy flowing into the atmosphere. This pretty much renders entropy irrelevant in this context.
So long as the sun shines, there will be wind. Forever, as a practical matter.
Metal prices:
Lithium costs less than it did 7 years ago (earliest data).
Cobalt costs less than it did 10 years ago.
Aluminium: Today’s price is $2,370 per tonne. 10 years ago it was $1,711. A CAGR of 3.3% versus inflation of 2.7%.
Copper: A 10 year CAGR of 2.0%.
CALIFORNIA LEADS US EMISSIONS OF SULFURYL FLUORIDE: STATE EMITS MORE THAN REST OF COUNTRY COMBINED
California, a state known for its aggressive greenhouse gas reduction policies, is ironically the nation’s greatest emitter of one: sulfuryl fluoride. “Other greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are found everywhere across the U.S. On our sulfuryl fluoride map, only California lit up like a Christmas tree.”
DESPITE GAINS IN BRAZIL, FOREST DESTRUCTION STILL ‘STUBBORNLY’ HIGH
The world lost 10 football fields of old-growth tropical forest every minute in 2023 and despite uplifting progress in the Amazon, the picture elsewhere is less rosy. “The world took two steps forward, two steps back when it comes to this past year’s forest loss,” said Weisse, director of WRI’s Global Forest Watch, which uses satellite imagery to aid its analysis.
WITH THE PLANET FACING A ‘POLYCRISIS,’ BIODIVERSITY RESEARCHERS UNCOVER MAJOR KNOWLEDGE GAPS
A scientific review has found almost no research studying the interconnections across three major threats to planetary health, despite UN assessments suggesting one million species are at risk of extinction, a global pandemic that resulted in over 6 million excess deaths, and a record-breaking year of global temperatures.
“There are misperceptions in the research community that more work in this area has already been done—but when you look for studies investigating the mechanisms linking the three crises, there isn’t much there at all.”
“An estimated 180,000 gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees are at risk due to an increase in demand for critical minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt, a study has found.”
As growth stalls and resources get sparse I think we’ll enter a new phase of habitat destruction where we give up any pretence of caring. Ultimately it will catch up to us with trophic cascades leading to massive famines, but it will be too late then. “What a piece of work is man?”
I think that DNA being just unstable enough to allow mutations to take hold at just about the right rate to produce the amazing complexity and incredible adaptions we have is the most fantastic thing the universe has produced and we are wiping out its greatest developments in a geological blink of an eye and they won’t ever come back the same. A cheetah’s speed, an octopuses nine brains, a duck billed platypus’s electric field, an eel’s life cycle, a tardigrade’s resilience (which might survive of course), etc. The most amazing fact of evolution that I’ve recently come across is that the shrinkage of a retile’s jaw bones to form part of the mammalian ear has happened at least four times independently, and converged on basically the same design.
The recent El Nino is waning and was weaker than those of 2016 and the late nineties and not enough to explain the temperature jump of the past twelve months. Sea surface and atmospheric temperatures are still well above 2023 numbers (i.e. setting daily maximum records) but the gap may be narrowing a bit (which will not be much comfort if you are trying to survive in the tropics at the moment).
In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism as “a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation” and that “The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.”
I moved and bought my home in HB in the summer 83. My brother in the late 80’s was part of an opening act as part of the group called the “Patterns”. It was just about the worse loud noise I had ever heard in my life. Had to try to cover my ears without being noticed. The Golden Bear was torn down a few years later. To this day I still swear the locals requested to the City Council to have the Golden Bear removed from downtown because of him.
Most days on the pier side of PCH and Main, MAGA hangs out with their flags and T-shirts promoting the Orange wonder. The last election, MAGA has also taken over the City Council and is having books like ” Everyone Poops” banned at the city library. All in the name of protecting the children.
The fact that republicans are still hot for trump, even after all that we have seen in the past 10 years, is an incredible damnation of our system of education,religion, and public discourse. Its a massive failure of human use of the most precious resource they/we have…its called a mind.
The most important quality of a president is character…things like integrity, good judgement, and restraint.
Trumps character traits would disqualify him from even being a boy scout troop leader, let alone a school principle. And yet about half of the country voters are willing to risk the country to him.
Its simply shameful.
In this world of so much social media, where people can just hear what they want, it all becomes self re-enforcing, so of course something like this has happened. Perhaps we can expect more in the future.
I agree it simply shameful, but sitting on the other side of the world, it’s kind of funny in an ironic sort of way. People here keep asking each other, How could Americans be so stupid?…
“People here keep asking each other, How could Americans be so stupid?…”
I guess Americans are like Germans in the 1930’s (for example). More gullible, stupid and delusional than you might expect. I was under the illusion that people might learn a bit from history.
I just spent two days with a team doing some work at the international airport in the resort city of Montego Bay. The airport is much busier than the other one in the capital city because it handles the vast majority of the tourist traffic and the majority of the resorts are on the north coast of the island. Traveling from the capital city to the resorts involves traversing the hilly interior of the island a journey that used to take a couple of hours before a 67 km four lane divided toll road was cofficially opened by the prime minister in March 2016.
A year an a half before the official opening, the segment going over the mountains in the center of the island was opened by the previous administration to much fanfare. The same Chinese state owned company that completed the highway has been doing most of the major road infrastructure improvement projects in the island with financing from the China Exim Bank something that has not gone unnoticed in the former colonial ruler of the island. (see Beijing highway: $600m road just the start of China’s investments in Caribbean) The issue has also raised concern in another former British colony see, Jamaica has China to thank for much-needed infrastructure — but some locals say it has come at a price
Back to my airport visit. Tourism is back! The airport was quite busy and on the approach to the airport there is a large billboard proclaiming “We are expanding to serve you better!” The company that has been contracted to do the expansion is a Chinese company that has been operating in the island for at least a decade. The airport is being operated by a Mexican company, Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico who have been investing heavily in solar PV, ostensibly to reduce their CO2 emissions. I think it has more to do with the fact that the savings on their electricity bill will pay off the investment in less than two years. The area where the team was working was right at the entrance to the airport complex and we couldn’t help but notice a steady stream of 40 foot tanker trucks delivering Jet A1 to the airport. The team leader remarked that one particular truck had made at least flour deliveries while we were there. Leads me to wonder why nobody has considered building a pipeline from the regional fuel depot 3.75 km away as the crow flies, from the airport jet A1 storage tanks.
Construction is booming in the Montego Bay area with a large new resort under construction on the eastern outskirts of the city and this news breaking this last January: Montego Bay welcomes US$350 million luxury skycraper project. Google Maps satellite images show that land is already being cleared at the location of the project and since the developers are a Chinese company it is very likely that it will be completed. Four 28 story residential towers, right on the sea shore in a island that is in an earthquake zone? What could possibly go wrong?
The idea of downsizing is very unpalatable so, downsizing is not going to happen by choice. That is why I advocate for measures that are not as much of a turn off for normal folks. Like the owners of the airport peoples eyes will light up when you tell them how much more money they will have available to spend (save) if they invest in solar PV or an EV. Tell them about the need for downsizing and overshoot and environmental disasters etc. and their eyes just glaze over and they tune you out. It is what it is!
Tell them about the need for downsizing and overshoot and environmental disasters etc. and their eyes just glaze over and they tune you out.
Which is why defenders of BAU and FF are delighted to have environmentalists talk about downsizing. It destroys environmentalists’ credibility, and BAU is a little safer.
If we want to prevent climate change and environmental risks, we should promote things that directly prevent or reduce climate change and environmental risks: downsizing is an enormously indirect, clumsy and destructive approach to this.
Everytime someone talks about downsizing, an angel gets his wings in far right heaven…(see “It’s A Wonderful Life”)
————
Slightly different phrasing for the same idea:
I think a large portion of those talking about degrowth are actually conservatives who are trying to prevent change by discrediting environmentalists. If they can associate a transition away from fossil fuels with a decline in living standards then they can make the whole idea of moving away from fossils look bad.
———
3rd way of saying the same thing:
Talking about “Accepting a smaller economy” is highly unrealistic: it would be less effective, and far more disruptive and politically difficult. I mean, think about it: if you simply reduce the economy by 50%, you might reduce GHG emissions by 50%. Well, why not reduce them by 80%, which is what you’d get by eliminating fossil fuels and replacing them with renewables (agriculture is the other 20%).
And, of course, we need to deal with agricultural GHG emissions: a very large part of that come from beef, which could be mostly replaced with plant-based ground beef without anyone noticing much change.
Those two things: renewables and plant-based ground beef, would probably reduce GHGs by 95%. That last 5% would be harder, but whatever we used to deal with it (sequestration, tree planting, mineral erosion, etc) would be infinitely easier and less disruptive than reducing the size of the economy.
Similarly, if you’re concerned about preserving wildlife, push for much larger parks and conservation areas. That’s E.O. Wilson’s proposal, and it’s far more direct and effective and feasible than reducing the size of the economy (or population).
Not sure where my comment disappeared to…
Nick G, why do you think those of us that can clearly see the BAU approach by a different means, just means more overshoot, are in favor of fossil fuels??
Those promoting renewables, EVs, batteries everywhere are the ones promoting more fossil fuel use to build it all. None of it pops into existence, it has to be made and built from minerals mined then processed. Why do you always ignore this step?
The Adaro new Aluminium Smelters in Borneo are a metaphor for what’s happening to build your bright green future. It means more destruction of the environment to ‘save’ modern civilization.
Burn the coal or destroy the rainforest to erect solar panels and dam the pristine river system to have pumped hydro backup.
Your promotion of wanting more material goods, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, EVs are all material goods, that must be made and have a limited lifetime. It all comes from MORE fossil fuel use, and then when replaced, it has to be replaced by greater fossil fuels use, mining lower grade ores.
We have backed ourselves into a corner with modernity, always demanding more, with humanity as a whole going into massive overshoot. Despite our supposed intelligence, as we change our environment negatively, we falsely believe that doing more of the same at an accelerated rate will solve the predicament we caused.
Interesting report, thanks. Building towers in earthquake zones is a pretty solved problem, as a visit to Japan will prove, so that is the least of your worries, if they are being built to any kind of reasonable standard.
“Like the owners of the airport peoples eyes will light up when you tell them how much more money they will have available to spend if they invest in solar PV or an EV.”
Jevon’s paradox was developed when the coal industry was new. A very young industry can be very expensive, and efficiency improvements & price reductions can allow the industry to expand dramatically. It doesn’t apply to mature industries like electric, gasoline, or energy in general.
The effect of Jevon’s is quantified by the elasticity of demand, and is expressed as a dimensionless parameter (meaning it’s a ratio of two items with the same dimension: fuel consumed per fuel saved, basically). That parameter is about .3 for electricity (the last time I looked), and probably lower for liquid fuel. So: if the electricity consumption falls and causes the price of electricity to drop by 10%, other consumption might be expected to rise by 3%.
Ask yourself: if the price of fuel goes down by 20%, are you going to run out and use more? Not likely. That is only likely if your consumption was sharply constrained by pricing in the first place, but fuel consumption is a secondary consideration mostly dictated by activity, and not the other way around (which also says something about the old correlation of GDP with oil consumption: economic activity drives energy use, not the other way around).
So, long story short: your efficiency or conservation is extremely helpful to the world!
HEAT-TRAPPING CARBON DIOXIDE AND METHANE LEVELS IN THE AIR LAST YEAR SPIKED TO RECORD HIGHS AGAIN
The levels of the crucial heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere reached historic highs last year, growing at near-record fast paces, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Carbon dioxide, the most important and abundant of the greenhouse gases caused by humans, rose in 2023 by the third highest amount in 65 years of record keeping. NOAA Scientists are also worried about the rapid rise in atmospheric levels of methane, a shorter-lived but more potent heat-trapping gas. Both jumped 5.5% over the past decade.
“Methane’s decadal spike should terrify us,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who heads the Global Carbon Project that tracks worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide but wasn’t part of NOAA’s report. “Fossil fuel pollution is warming natural systems like wetlands and permafrost. Those ecosystems are releasing even more greenhouse gases as they heat up. We’re caught between a rock and a charred place.”.
Thanks Hideaway for continuing to draw our attention to the Adaro plant in Borneo. Seems like it’s controversial:
The project was being marketed as a flagship green, renewable development for the south-east Asian economy, even though it appeared to involve building a 2.2 GW coal power plant. Adaro Minerals was planning to expand into aluminum and battery making for electric vehicles, but most of its revenue was still from coal.
And to answer your question, no, I wouldn’t build the coal power stations but wait for the hydro. If this results in an increased price for aluminium, so be it. We’ll adapt.
John Norris, Even the hydro dam, which is only a 30% of what they really plan to do, means the destruction of a pristine rainforest river, all in the effort of going green…
Oh well, at least we can say that our winters are warmer now!
THE MAJORITY OF FOSSIL FUEL COMPANIES PRODUCE MORE EMISSIONS AFTER PARIS AGREEMENT THAN BEFORE
Most fossil fuel companies have produced more emissions in the seven years since the Paris Agreement was signed than the seven years before the major climate pact, a new report reveals. It found that 80 per cent of the fossil fuel and cement emissions since the Paris Agreement have come from just 57 producers. State-owned oil producer Saudi Aramco has produced the most carbon emissions since the Paris Agreement, making up 4.8 per cent of global emissions.
So, is burning more coal to charge EVs (or run air conditioners) progress?
CHINA, INDIA BOOST SEABORNE THERMAL COAL IMPORTS AS POWER DEMAND SURGES
China and India lifted imports of seaborne thermal coal to three-month highs in March as the world’s two biggest buyers took advantage of lower international prices of the fuel to meet strong domestic power demand.
China’s electricity demand is being boosted by a variety of factors, INCLUDING INCREASING ELECTRIFICATION OF THE VEHICLE FLEET, higher demand from air conditioners and appliances, and increased electrification of industrial processes, such as some types of smelting.
RFK definitely does not appeal to the MSNBC crowd. I’ve listened to him and he appears far more likely to appeal to Trump’s base. As Bernie Sanders is fond of saying, a lot of what has ended up as the Democratic platform appeals to the majority of the American electorate. It’s the very rich GOP donors that are creating the opinion that voters are against many of the things like reigning in Big Pharma and the rich paying their fair share of taxes.
His VP pick is certainly an attempt to peal off the democratic vote.
He’ll grab enough of both party votes to put up a wildcard effect.
I do think that trumps base is more committed to the man in kind of a religious fanatical way,
so I think the overall affect is much more helpful to trump.
All it takes is one state to be swayed by a few thousand votes.
Cheers Hick, I hadn’t considered the VP pick. Speaking of VPs, KH is fire. Pro choice/Abortion rights are a massive motivator to show up at the polls; VP Harris is on it.
I know that many (most?) people would like different candidate choices and additional parties.
Our choice has always been to vote against the worst choice (Trump this time around),
with us left then having to vote for a candidate with what we generally consider to have both sub-optimal policy positions and flawed persona (after all they have always been humans… so far).
Such is any system where you have the luxury of a choice.
If we are ever to have a successful third party emerge I assert that it will come from a sane middle, if we can find such a thing and person to represent that neglected ground.
A successful alternative won’t come from ‘progressives’ or from the Maga/tea party/evangelical wing of the country. And it won’t come from those who are from the weird intersections of these two extremes…such as anti-vaxxers, secessionists, science deniers, god enforcers, or conspiracy hounds.
I think Kennedy falls in to that latter category. No wonder his family will vote against him.
It will be yet another example of wasted votes, votes that may very well empower the worst of us.
Given that many Americans would vote for Trump, they are on average not very bright, or at minimum are not students of history (or are perhaps fond of fascists).
In any case consider a voter who bothers to go to the polls and like many in the US is not well informed. The voter is not particularly fond of Trump, but thinks Biden as done a lousy job, they see this RFK fellow on the ballot and thinkm, hey Kennedy might not be bad (if they are at all left of center), these are voters who would otherwise vote for the Democratic nominee as the right of center folks would vote for the Republican nominee, also those in the middle who are uninformed might choose RFK as well (though in this case RFK might take equal votes from Trump or Biden). Keep in mind in swing states it might be 5000 voltes separating the winner and loser and a third part candidate can make a difference as it did in 2000 and in 2016.
Cheers Dennis, I would have thought RFK appeals to the Qanon/Pizza gate/anti establishment-mystic crowd, who seem to otherwise prefer Trumps rhetoric. I feel RFK will diminish Trumps vote count, not Biden’s.
It’s perhaps worth remembering that Trump didn’t win the popular vote in 2016 or 2020; and he likely won’t in 2024 either.
I feel electoral politics is more about motivating your voters to show up at the polls, and less about swaying their opinions. IMHO nothing motivates female voters more than a VP Kamala Harris pro choice speech.
Popular vote nationwide is irrelevant, the election will be decided by a very narrow group of undecided voters in 4 to 6 states Pennsylvannia, Michigan, Wisconson, and Georgia and maybe Arizona and Nevada as well. RFK’s actual views seem to coincide more with the MAGA crowd, but most of them will vote for Trump, a large majority of those undecided voters probably don’t pay attention and may associate the Kennedy name with more left wing political views, many of those who might have chosen Biden, but aren’t paying attention or listen to the mainstream media that points to Biden being the reason for inflation, but give no credit to him for the lowest unemployment for such a long period (under 4% for 24 months straight) since 1967, may choose RFK because they know nothing about his views.
Everybody outside of China has a problem. Spend the time, money and effort to re-shore as much of these critical new industries as they can or be content to depend on China for basically all your stuff!
Some of the regulars here insist that we might as well give up on renewable electricity, etc, because scaling it up necessarily involves a substantial amount of damage to the environment.
This is quite obviously true, and in some cases this damage will be in addition to the usual damages caused by industrialization. A lithium deposit in a wilderness area might never be mined if the lithium isn’t needed for a gazillion ev batteries.
But leaving it in the ground isn’t going to help very much, if it helps at all, in terms of preserving the environment. If we don’t go green, the odds not far from one hundred percent that we’re going to burn every last barrel of oil we can get out of the ground, every cubic meter of gas we can get out of the ground, every tree that’s available within a few hundred miles of a power plant, etc. The only thing, other than going green, that’s likely to stop us from doing so is a world wide crash and burn economic and ecological collapse.
Nobody other than a very few true believers of the green sort will ever voluntarily give up his or her modern day lifestyle. That’s totally out of the question. No politician will ever propose such a course of action.
But it’s been amply demonstrated that the general public and plenty of businessmen of various sorts are willing to put tons of money and manpower into building wind and solar infrastructure out the ying yang.
And so far as I can see, the only reason we won’t continue to building out these industries is that the necessary raw materials may be unavailable in the necessary quantities. It’s quite obvious that given the fact that renewable electricity, once the infrastructure is in place, is produced on a fuel free basis as a practical matter, and that producing it on the grand scale is pretty much a no brainer given that oil and gas deplete, and that most of the remaining supply belongs to countries and people who to put it very mildly are not necessarily anybody’s friends.
This argument holds true in general terms even though renewable electricity is intermittent and that we may never fully solve the associated storage issue …… when we build in places with a good wind and solar resource.
Of course we’re going to have to maintain a lot of existing and possibly build some new gas fired capacity, and maybe some coal capacity as well, for at least three or four decades, maybe a lot longer, and we will have to work this out so that the cost of maintaining this standby capacity is paid for, one way or another, with the cost being passed on to the end use customers.
Nobody here who says doing it will cost too much seems to have anything to say about how much we can save on armies, navies, and air forces, or how much LESS electricity we can use if we put some real effort into conservation and efficiency, etc.
Nor do the naysayers give any much in any weight to the fact that the population will be peaking and falling in the not so distant future, or to the fact that we can build just about every thing involved in these industries so that when stuff wears out, it can be recycled…… including wind turbine blades.
OFM, we both believe we are going into further massive overshoot until we eventually collapse. There is no current evidence that we will leave any of the available fossil fuels in the ground either.
If we try to continue to ‘grow’ the human enterprise, whether with fossil fuels or solar and wind, we do more damage to the environment, either way. Because we build all the solar and wind machines and storage with fossil fuels, we need more use of fossil fuels to build more of them, it’s a Catch 22 anyway. Assuming we can keep growing fossil fuel use for another decade, we will indeed build out a huge amount of solar and wind machines, causing huge further damage to the environment in the process, from burning the fossil fuels to build it, to the vast areas cleared for mining and siting all the solar and wind machines.
All it does is mean the total energy ‘use’ in 10 years time will be much higher, so the base we aim for in building solar and wind machines will be higher, meaning more mines needed, more land cleared for the energy collection machines, in a never ending spiral of more!! Population is not going to decline for many decades under BAU scenarios. Population decline is not going to help us any time soon, especially with only 15% of humanity ‘enjoying’ modern civilization. Western countries keep importing people so are growing anyway..
Once we get well past peak fossil fuel production, building of anything will become much more difficult, as we just wont have the energy available to do it. Who wins the energy race in modern civilization in competition for diminishing energy?
Will the energy go to farmers, or heavy transport, or mining, or manufacturing, or building? Where does the reduction in energy available come from? Is it government directed or free market? When discretionary businesses go bust due to lack of customers as living costs (food, energy, health, govt taxes) all rise, how are those out of work fed?
Where does the money and energy come from when we are in serious fossil fuel decline? Who do you take energy off, to build ‘anything’, let alone recycling plants or more wind and solar mines and factories?
The bright green future looks easy, providing you use a series of hand waves, we’ll just build …… (fill in the blank with whatever), never considering where the energy comes from to do it, in a world where energy is declining rapidly.
It’s a situation totally different to anything we’ve experienced over the last 200 years, while we have had massive and growing energy availability. No-one has lived through a time of year after year decline in energy and therefore material availability, except for perhaps people that live in Lebanon or Sri Lanka or similar places..
Now tell me how much energy in places like Lebanon are going into building recycling factories, without outside help?? Once we are in energy decline, worldwide, there can be no ‘outside’ help.
Humanity as a whole has made the choice to go into hard, fast civilizational collapse once we have accelerating fossil fuel (oil in particular) decline, no matter what the cost to the environment. By denying there is a problem by promoting ‘renewables’ then we just fall from a greater height with more damage to the natural world when it happens.
“By denying there is a problem by promoting ‘renewables’ then we just fall from a greater height with more damage to the natural world when it happens.”
Interesting stance that you take, as an elderly person who in is a member of a cohort of less than 5% of the global population and who has lived high on the fossil fuel energy hog for the past 70 years. And now you want tell the younger 95% that they should stand down…and get used to living in some degree of energy poverty. That they should not make attempts to provide themselves with non-fossil energy to supplement fossil energy consumption as the supplies decline.
Of course all of the industrial endeavors of mankind are destructive to the environment, even more so after the routine deployment of metal making became widespread.
But here we are, with metal and plastic and explosives and solvents and nuclear fission…. and approaching 8.2 billion individuals.
This is not some theoretical discussion. We left the garden of eden before we even were an ‘officially designated’ species. Collectively, humans around the world are going to go ahead and work hard to replace depleting fossil fuels. The peak of human population, of carbon emissions, and of industrial activity is on the horizon…a decade or four from now depending on which indicator you are specifying.
If you really cared about the biosphere as a priority you would have ceased and desisted from the destruction beginning in the 1970’s when you became aware of the issue.
Hickory … “If you really cared about the biosphere as a priority you would have ceased and desisted from the destruction beginning in the 1970’s when you became aware of the issue.”
Pretty sure you have no idea what I’ve been doing for the last few decades. It’s interesting how you choose the ‘shoot the messenger’ response.
It doesn’t change the reality of us being in massive overshoot one iota. Every one of us that uses a computer is part of the problem, so yes I’m part of the overall problem, but one person stopping use of as much modernity as possible, also makes practically zero difference in the big picture. Someone else will just use those resources. It’s only by humanity as a whole understanding the massive problem we have created, that it becomes even slightly possible to do anything about it.
The constant denial by some, of any problem, and just destroy MORE nature to build MORE (solar, wind, nuclear, coal, gas, oil, EVs or whatever) by others, as any type of solution is exactly what guarantees massive collapse.
The blame game is the easy out for most people, instead of realising that it’s our collective actions over many generations, to make our life better (in our minds), to the detriment of all other life on the planet. I expect a whole lot more of the blame game happening in the future leading to resource wars, it’s what we have done historically.
Humanity simply can’t survive without other life, and a smart species would eventually realise we have to stop growth before we destroy our home, plus the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet.
Perhaps humanity is just not that smart overall.
We are probably going from the industrial economy being able to give a devastating punch like in Great Britain late 1800 century, WW2 USA or China early this century, to just producing slow jabs not quite enough for everything. The maintenance economy would mean that not all infrastructure could be rebuilt or maintained at wish, but rather get prioritised.
The main point being how much more easy it is to maintain something that is already planned for orginally and set into a system like renewables, water supply, the grid, renovation and many more basic services (and not at least real estate) compared to starting from scratch would be very substantial. And it helps tremendously when adapting to not having an industrial iron fist, but rather a slow jab some decades ahead.
And even though a “slow jab” does not sound great, a large renewables sector have the advantage of actually having a long term energy solution. The critics aim at the machinery and production necessary to keep renewables up and that it would fail. First, everything will fail due to a collapse in fossil fuel production. Not just renewables. Second, renewable energy production would then fall at low rate due to infrastructure mostly being in place. The idea that we can not be inventive in a decline phase is just not very good. Replace super magnets with regular magnets, turbine blades made in glass fiber to other materials, get enough copper and aluminium recycled, have a plan for enough rubber. And also add in all possible energy storage innovation solutions coming. We would have plenty of fire power to play around that for some decades, but it requires a grid system that already have been implemented or are close to be finished (in 2030-40 max?) to handle the load.
The high share renewable economy compared to a fossil fuel based one is possible according to experts. Cutting out fossil fuel is not really the question since we will still have the burning of more current biomass and some degree of historical biomass.
everything will fail due to a collapse in fossil fuel production. Not just renewables.
I’m so puzzled by this proposition. It makes no sense. Land transportation, construction machinery, all of the motors that use diesel can be electrified, and TCO will be less than existing FF burning equipment. Aviation and water transportation are harder, of course, but even if synthetic liquid fuels are more expensive they’d still allow aviation: make jet fuel 2 or even 3 times more expensive, and flying might get 50% more expensive, and you’d get a little less vacation travel. Not a big deal. And water transportation would be relatively easy to power with H2, ammonia, methanol, etc.
50 years ago this was a somewhat reasonable concern, but now??
The best argument for collapse is that our financial institutions are complex and fragile, and can’t stand the stress of sudden change. I agree that’s….conceivable. Heck, we saw the Great Depression because the banking system couldn’t handle the pace of industrialization and consolidation of farms, and we came pretty close to a big failure in 2008 due to a sudden reversal of home building, causing a sudden credit crunch. But, there’s not really a good reason to expect a complete collapse, from which recovery isn’t possible. We had a similar “collapse” in 1929 – it was very painful, but it was reversible. In fact, hard times in farm communities actually accelerated investment in tractors and increased farm labor productivity.
Certainly not a collapse caused by a lack of energy. The US, for instance, could easily reduce the impact of reduced oil supplies by reducing oil consumption by 25% overnight with aggressive conservation, carpooling, etc. Look at what was done in WWII – domestic oil consumption was reduced dramatically to support the war effort.
And, we have better and cheaper alternatives right at hand, ready for investment and ramping up of production. In the short term reduced buying of ICEs might hurt the economy, but in just a few years EVs would stimulate the economy.
The idea that a lack of oil will cause the economy to collapse, either fast or slowly, is a bogeyman. It works nicely for the oil companies, who want to push for “drill, baby drill”, but it doesn’t make sense.
And a slow collapse makes even less sense than a fast collapse: a slower rate of change would make adaptation much, much easier.
Nick G, you totally miss the point again, or is it still?
” all of the motors that use diesel can be electrified”
In a world of declining energy availability, when oil production is in actual decline year after year, where does the energy come from to build the mines and factories to do all this replacement on a civilizational level? The copper ore grades are declining now, so how do you get copper for this great electrification?
The transition away from all this diesel machinery is not happening now, while we still have fossil fuel growth, so how can it possible happen in fossil fuel decline??
All your hand wavy comments about ”we can do this with electricity”……… ignore the reality that we have not done it over the last 200 years, so expecting us to transfer over with way less energy available defies physics among other realities..
The ‘new’ copper mines we will have to build are in remote locations of lower ore grades, it’s not just an easy ‘hand wave’ to gain access to these minerals…
The financial collapse scenario is as you describe; if prices move too quickly there is a problem. That does not necessarily have to happen anytime soon.
When it comes the energy transition I have “bought” into narrative that the fossil fuel dependecy is a scale problem. If it is 1/5 of what I think it is, I am increasingly buying into your thinking and solutions. Reading Vaclav Smil books and following oil and gas industry for 20-30 years have influenced my opinion.
What do you think have been the most useful ideas from Vaclav Smil?
I have never read a comment that suggests we should “give up” on renewables by anyone; mostly people are just pointing out that renewables are not really doing what their proponents are asserting. The next time you post one of these screeds on the subject could you provide a quote please. My main objection is to EV “passenger” vehicles, which hardly ever carry any more than a driver cocooned in ultimate comfort in several hundred kilograms of various materials, and which I think are mostly a rich man’s virtue signal (and based on all the data and current trends are doing nothing to slow resource over exploitation or climate change, but might be doing a lot of good for their owners mate finding success). My guess is their loudest cheerleaders have intestines that turn liquid at the merest thought of sharing a seat with the hoi polloi on a bus or tram. However my opinion isn’t going to change anything, see below, I just find the constant boosting of the latest trivial and banal technological breakthrough as if it is some kind of game changing manna instead of another nail in civilisation’s coffin, as a bit tedious.
From my perspective we do not have free will and therefore what is going to happen has already been predetermined although presently unknown and unknowable. Statements like “giving up on …”, “we need to …” and “we would be stupid to …” are meaningless because they assume our decisions are conscious and logical, In fact our higher brains mostly just solve day to day problems of survival and reproduction or are used to post rationalise behaviours that are driven from our limbic system and have been programmed by billions of years of evolution to maximise our reproductive success – i.e. to get our genes into our children and ensure they make it through to a reproductive age of their own. You trumpet the falling birth rate but a lot of that is because, instead of having many children and hoping a couple make it, we are now having fewer but investing many more resources in them, with the result that the overall environmental footprint from having children grows.
Quiet right. Although if we do “Go Green” there’s perhaps a slight chance we’ll take better care and maybe ours and other species will claw through it. Into eternity.
‘Green’ is a non-useful term when it comes to things that humans do.
We erase or diminish green, by and large.
Get over it…. the terminology issue.
Call it ‘Lesser Black’ if that seems more accurate.
Acapulco Gold was really a just shade of green (no stems…no seeds).
China is set to dominate manufacturing of EVs and will drive legacy auto out of business! This video includes a segment about the launch of the latest smart phone on wheels from smart phone manufacturer Xaomi. This is not a joke! The Chinese government is behind this!
Yes, need to insert a little complexity to exclude loopholes.
Elizabeth Warren is the US legislator who has become a leading expert of the policy issues around this. I was disappointment that she didn’t gain traction in the last election round.
You can look up her stance to get an idea of what a good policy in this area looks like.
New science has taken a deep dive into plastic waste, providing the first estimate of how much ends up on the sea floor. Australia’s national science agency, and the University of Toronto in Canada, estimates up to 11 million tonnes of plastic pollution is sitting on the ocean floor.
Every minute, a garbage truck’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. With plastic use expected to double by 2040, understanding how and where it travels is crucial to protecting marine ecosystems and wildlife.
Dr Denise Hardesty, Senior Research Scientist with CSIRO, said this is the first estimate of how much plastic waste ends up on the ocean floor, where it accumulates before being broken down into smaller pieces and mixed into ocean sediment.
“Reconductoring”….yep, its spelled intentionally that way.
“Reconductoring existing US power lines could quadruple new transmission capacity by 2035.
Reconductoring projects typically cost less than half the price of
new lines for similar capacity increases.”
I didn’t realize that electrical transmission lines weren’t copper based. “The most common conductor [cable] in use for transmission today is aluminum conductor steel reinforced (ACSR).”
Yeah, one of the reasons that copper scarcity is pretty unlikely to be a major problem is that roughly 95% of its uses has good substitutes – mostly aluminum.
So you agree that we need lots more Aluminium, like the smelters being built by Adaro in Indonesia, using coal fired power to do it, because it’s so much cheaper than solar and backup (around 1/10 of the cost). But even solar in their location near the equator will require the destruction of hundreds of square kilometers of pristine rainforest to build and pristine rainforest river systems.
If you are against the Adaro development, coal or solar, then where does the Aluminium come from?? Which other natural system do you want destroyed for the new Aluminium smelters? Which landscape is acceptable to you, too destroy, for this extra placement of solar and wind??
It’s the constant notion that we need MORE, of anything that’s the problem. We are in deep overshoot and the only possible solution is less, not more, so every time you utter the concept of more (anything) you should know it’s the wrong answer, straight away.
It doesn’t matter what the form of energy is as the concept of MORE is what has put our planetary home at risk, climate, ecosystems, ocean life, etc, so EVERY answer that comes up with a solution of MORE is just a continuation of the problem.
How on Earth doesn’t it occur to you that we’ve been on the path of ‘mitigation’ of the climate symptom of our overshoot for several decades, by building mountains more ‘stuff’ (wind turbines, solar panels, EVs batteries, changing coal to gas fired power plants, etc), yet the entire time we have only made the situation worse by every metric?
How can the solution possibly be doing more of the same??
Portuguese utility says renewables covered 91% of demand in March
Some countries are further along the path to 100% renewable energy than others.
That’s great!
What does Portugal do with excess production – does it get sold to Spain/France or does it get grounded (i.e. thrown away)?
Rgds
Vince
COMBINATION OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS AND CONTINUED DEFORESTATION MAY RESULT IN SIGNIFICANT DAMAGE TO THE ANIMAL WORLD
A new study states that the combination of global warming and extreme heat events, alongside the continued expansion of deforestation in the world, may be devastating for many species of animals, especially those that know how to climb trees. As part of the study, the researchers focused on lizards and showed that following the effects of climate change, they will seek refuge from the hot ground by spending a lot of time on trees. However, due to human-related activities, such as deforestation, urbanization and the expansion of agricultural lands at the expense of natural lands, the availability of trees in the areas where the lizards live will decrease, and this may lead to the collapse of many populations.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240327124644.htm
HALF OF RAINFORESTS ALREADY DESTROYED
In 2000, half of the world’s rainforest had been wiped out. If we continue the rate of destruction, the rainforests will be gone at the end of the century, according to NASA. The rate of tropical deforestation has almost doubled in 15 years. 2016 was the worst year ever with a total loss of tropical forest of 16.9 million hectares. 2017 was slightly “better” with 15.8 million hectares lost. An area almost the size of the state of Washington. On top of the disappearing rainforests, other types of forests are also being destroyed. In 2016, a world record of 30 million hectares of forests worldwide disappeared. That’s an area the size of Italy or Norway. 2017 just missed the record with a total loss of 29.4 million hectares. In just 40 years, one billion hectares of forests have been cut down worldwide. That’s an area bigger than China. The general reason for cutting down the world’s forest: The increasing world population and expanding consumer economy. The world population is growing by 215,000 people a day and the number of consumers grows by 350,000 people a day.
https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/state-of-the-planet/when-will-the-rainforests-be-gone
So,
TO FEED THE GROWING DEMAND FROM A GROWING POPULATION, TREES ARE CUT DOWN FOR:
• Fuel
• Land for housing and urbanization
• Paper
• Furniture
• Palm trees (for palm oil)
• Room for cattle ranching
Up to 75 percent of life on the planet lives in rainforests. Most of these millions of species – many still undiscovered by humans – would be wiped out if the rainforest disappeared. There would simply be nowhere else to go. Up to 75 percent of life on the planet lives in rainforests. Most of these millions of species – many still undiscovered by humans – would be wiped out if the rainforest disappeared. There would simply be nowhere else to go. It’s not only the rainforests that are disappearing. We are also running out of freshwater and fish in the world’s oceans.
It’s all happening in real time, look at Rio De Janiero as a prime example:
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/3/18/photos-record-heat-index-of-62-3c-scorches-rio-de-janeiro
Heat index >62.3C, which is HI 144 F (above 125 F is extreme danger)…
Renewable energy’s share on German power grids reaches 55% in 2023
Germany’s 2023 renewable power installations hit record, but wind sector lags
Germany’s new PV additions hit 1.25 GW in January
And they have started off 2024 with a bang!
The only thing slowing down solar installations in Germany is acute labor shortages. All the installers are booked out months in advance.
Share of renewables in electricity production
I wonder why they omit Costa Rica which is over 98% renewable power.
That is really strange! makes me wonder if there are any other countries they’ve left out?
Uruguay, Iceland… and more
I was struck by an article posted in the last non-oily section:
Electric two wheelers are much more numerous that four-wheelers and reducing demand for oil 4x as much.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/e-scooters-slashing-oil-demand-4x-faster-than-electric-cars/
Funny thing about 2 wheelers: they have the aerodynamics of a brick: roughly 3x worse than vehicles like a Prius. So, a typical motorbike gets about 80MPG and a Harley gets about 50MPG, while a Prius can get 60MPG and if it carries 4 people it can get 240 passenger-miles per gallon.
So 2 or 3 bikes use as much fuel as an average light vehicle, and e-bikes are very effective at reducing demand.
Another thought: e-bikes are good at eliminating liquid fuel, but a 4 wheel EV is likely to be more efficient, and be a lot safer and more comfortable. It will be cheaper than an ICE’s total cost of ownership, but of course many people in developing countries can’t even afford a used 4-wheel vehicle.
That’s the weird aspect, never tried a gas motorcycle myself but can see myself getting an eBike at some point. First time I got passed by one was on a hill climb, an elderly woman with pedal assist (which freaked me out for a sec). That’s the thing — scores of people will try an eBike that would never get near a motorcycle.
I added a midrive electric motor kit to my bike to help me get my fat old ass up and down the steep hills here in rural Tn. Rode bikes all my life and commuted for six years on one. Ebikes are great but for anyone tight on money a Honda 150 would be a much better deal. Quality ebikes cost more than a basic motorcycle and while 15 mph is my happy speed bikes are not welcome sharing the roads in America.
Nick G —
a 4 wheel EV is likely to be more efficient, and be a lot safer and more comfortable.
The only reason you think single occupancy cars are convenient is that vast sums have been spent to make them that way. America in particular has torn down its cities to fit cars into them. The reason biking and public transportation are slow is mostly because cars are in the way.
It’s not an experiment that is likely to be repeated in mostly of the world. The crowded cities of Asia simply don’t have to money to wreck themselves for the benefit of the few that can afford cars.
Here’s an X account illustrating what I mean.
https://twitter.com/carsruinedcity
I agree that mass transit is a great thing. I’ve spent decades riding in electric trains: quiet, safe, fast, chauffered. What’s not to like?
I hate buses, but that’s partly because they’re diesel. E-buses would be far better.
Mass transit does require fairly high population density: the primary cost is labor, which becomes prohibitive when covering 24×7 to all locations every 10-15 minutes, unless things are pretty dense. Autonomous vehicles may change that.
Europe is an bad comparison, because they prioritized passengers, and their rail freight transportation is pretty clumsy. The US, on the other hand, prioritized freight, which makes rail passenger travel slow and clumsy.
I don’t think bikes are very practical as a general solution. I biked for thousands of miles when I was young, when I was a puppy. They’re great fun & great exercise, and can be a very useful niche solution, but barriers include people with disabilities (my knee is complaining at the thought!), weather, cargo, and long distances.
I agree that we should expand public transport: we don’t have to choose one thing. But, starting where we are now, that’s a very, very slow way to reduce oil consumption. Electrification of land transportation, in all it’s various forms, is the straightforward and fast solution.
Nick —
The real problem is bonkers city design that forces people to travel long distances. Corner stores are banned almost everywhere in America, so people drive a lot.
Even so, 60% of car trips are under 10K, which is bikeable.
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2018/08/20180814-fotw.html
The reason cities should get more dense is to save money on infrastructure. suburbia is massively subsidized.
Here is Chuck Marohn on the topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGxni1c-klM&ab_channel=StrongTowns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD47xo3c7WU&ab_channel=StrongTowns
“which is bikeable.”
aka scooterable, eBikeable, golfCartable, … what other forms are available?
I ran across this one, which is likely an elaborate April Fools joke, but it got me going — Tesla electric powered downhill skis
https://jskis.com/blogs/its-just-skiing/tesla
probably a rope that has been digitally erased?
The Tesla skis are indeed a joke, but electric snowboards are a thing:
https://www.cyrusher.com/pages/electric-snowboard
“suburbia is massively subsidized”
I’ve read this frequently, and got the same sense from your video clips. Any chance you could point towards some solid research with good data and boundary conditions that supports this? I am not suggesting either agreement or disagreement, just looking for solid analysis. The light digging I’ve done has not been satisfying.
Yeah, I’d be curious to see a really good analysis of the per capita costs of large cities versus suburbs and exurbs.
Sadly, I would be very surprised if it existed. I’ve done analysis like this comparing revenues of different units of local government, and it’s very difficult to do well. Different units of government have different kinds of taxes, levied for different reasons, and expenses are the same way.
The infrastructure costs in particular can be paid for out of your operating budget, out of your capital budget, the general fund, a special fund, via grants, overhead costs can be allocated or not, they could be amortized in different ways, underlying and long-term cost may not be recognized at all, etc. etc.
Finally, I would be surprised if infrastructure costs were the major part of the budget. Operating Cost, especially labor are likely to be bigger, than capital costs (even including maintenance) and also a very difficult to compare. Education is very expensive, so is police and fire, their costs can be recognized at multiple levels of government Including pension costs, equipment, cost, etc. There are a lot of odd variables. For instance, police departments often pay for large part of the capital budget by confiscating the assets of people accused of selling drugs.
I don’t know about subsidized as much as an artifact of plentiful and cheap liquid fuel and the room to build new subdivisions.
“suburbia is massively subsidized”
The two things that come to mind are:
1) that roads (including the national highway system and local roads) are public property: they claimed a great deal of valuable land for free (most of which was inhabited), and they don’t pay property taxes (unlike, say most rail); and
2) IIRC some publicly subsidized mortgages (FHA? VA?) were targeted at suburbia; and
3) fossil liquid fuel is cheap because of external costs which are not accounted for in the market price (at least in the US): expensive pollution; high security costs (several $trillion for Gulf Wars I and II, for instance, not to mention a large long-term military presence for the ME); and high costs of unstable supply (which is why we call it an “Oil Shock” Model – those economic shocks can cost $trillions).
Just one analysis:
“This paper provides a comprehensive global, regional, and country-level update of: (i) efficient fossil fuel prices to reflect their full private and social costs; and (ii) subsidies implied by mispricing fuels. The methodology improves over previous IMF analyses through more sophisticated estimation of costs and impacts of reform. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8 percent of GDP, and are expected to rise to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025. Just 8 percent of the 2020 subsidy reflects undercharging for supply costs (explicit subsidies) and 92 percent for undercharging for environmental costs and foregone consumption taxes (implicit subsidies). Efficient fuel pricing in 2025 would reduce global carbon dioxide emissions 36 percent below baseline levels, which is in line with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees, while raising revenues worth 3.8 percent of global GDP and preventing 0.9 million local air pollution deaths. Accompanying spreadsheets provide detailed results for 191 countries.”
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Still-Not-Getting-Energy-Prices-Right-A-Global-and-Country-Update-of-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-466004
It’s still against the law to convert garages into apartments, or subdivide an existing house into two dwelling spaces, creating a ” mother in law” apartment, etc, just about everywhere in the USA.
But it’s happening on the grand scale in some places anyway, with local city government being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Enforcing the regs would mean huge numbers of new homeless people, tons of property owners up in arms due to the loss of income, loss of privacy due to mother in law in the house, etc.
So they are simply ignoring the regulations in a lot of cases.
I personally foresee some dramatic changes coming in zoning regs over the next couple of decades, such that small low traffic neighbor hood businesses will eventually be the rule rather than the exception in residential areas.
Such businesses are already quite common in a lot of urban neighborhoods already. I lived in such a neighborhood once myself and worked from home, rather than renting a shop. You can do at least a third of the everyday routine work needed on cars in a single car garage if you have the tools. It takes longer but doing it still pays well.
An older lady living across the street took had a couple of dozen customers for her home laundry business, and made a couple of hundred bucks a week cash to supplement her SS check.
This isn’t going to work so well in suburban neighborhoods where the houses are on large lots because potential customers are fewer in number and farther away, but it can still work for people doing almost any sort of accounting, advertising, or one on one professional work, such as lawyers consulting individual clients, etc.
Actually, what I’m seeing in the NorthWest, is that local governments are leading the charge in changing Zoning Laws to allow ADUs to increase density and housing availability. In my town, there have been a remarkable amount of change in the last few years since the laws were changed.
California state law supersede all local zoning/planning regulation as of 1/1/21,
allowing a 1200 sq ft adu on all residential lots.
I believe a second adu is also part of the provision if it is carved out of the primary house.
“In California in 2021, 65,000 single-family home permits were approved, while around 30,000 ADU permits were submitted in 2022.
I have read that something like 18 e bikes can be produced for the same resource footprint as an EV. I have used electric recumbent trikes now for 12 years. My wife and I both put about 1500 miles each on them each summer. We average about 17 watts per miles. We typically travel 12 mph because we are on gravel roads. 16 mph on paved roads. Top end is about 25 mph. We have 16 amp hour x 36v batteries so range is very good. Lighter and slower will eventually be the keys to sustainable travel. The batteries have lasted well, more problems with the BMS in the battery packs than the batteries themselves. Putting any kind of fairing would dramatically improve efficiency. I have two mountain bikes that are electric as well, but much prefer the recumbent trikes.
An e-bike is vastly more efficient than an EV. I have used electric recumbent trikes for around 12 years now. Put 1500 miles a year in them. 17 watts per mile. I easily charge these 36v x 16 ahr batteries on my solar panel. Compare that to a Tesla. For urban use they are hard to beat. Most studies i have read suggest around 18 to 20 e-bikes can be produced for the same footprint as a single EV. Below 15mph and wind resistance is not much of a factor, A typical EV would need to carry 8-10 people to reach the efficiency of an e-bike. It is a function of mass and speed. You are very light on analysis that support your opinions. I have over 10,000 miles of experience with e-bikes and e-trikes. Comparing a Harley to a Prius and concluding 2 to 3 e-bikes use as much fuel as an average light vehicle!!! You are a joke sir, an average high school physics student can do better than that!!
These cargo delivery electric assist human powered type vehicles will be very useful in the hot world that becomes short of oil
-https://electrek.co/2023/06/23/eav-zoomo-four-wheeled-electric-cargo-bikes-replace-delivery-vans-in-cities/
-https://www.freightwaves.com/news/big-brown-is-going-small-in-test-of-e-cargo-bikes
-https://electrek.co/2022/12/11/mate-suv-electric-cargo-bike/
-https://cyclingindustry.news/amazon-turns-to-electric-cargo-bikes-for-city-delivery/
Add PV and they could be an interesting platform for the homeless electric nomads of the future also.
We do indeed have more Rebuildables than ever before, there is nothing renewable about solar panels, nor wind turbines, nor for that matter hydro electric dams and turbines. We can build all of these gizmos by mining, processing and transporting minerals over vast distances, all using fossil fuels. It’s just as well fossil fuels use has increased by ~34,000Twh per annum, over the last 20 years or we probably couldn’t have built the ~3,400Twh of electricity we do gain from rebuildables.
Of course companies need lots of new ‘products’ to sell people and governments so we have all these new electricity generating products, and of course batteries, that all have limited lifespans, to sell to people, in the ever increasing pursuit of ‘growth’ in the world economy..
None of it is sustainable in any way, all of it just guarantees more destruction of the natural environment and fast extinction of (currently) around 13 species per day, so that we humans, the 15% who enjoy modernity, can continue on a little longer in a lifestyle we are use to…
Tom Murphy sums it up very well, how we compartmentalise our thinking to believe in a future fantasy….
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/04/distilled-disintegration/
Once again, now 3 weeks in a row, I’ll ask all the usual cornucopians the same question..
The Adaro coal fired power plants and Aluminium smelters are going to be built in Borneo to supply Aluminium, that we need a lot more of (for all the new solar panels). Would it be ‘better’ if instead of using coal power, they destroyed hundreds of square kilometers of rainforest to put up solar panels, and dammed pristine rivers for the backup pumped hydro power??
This one large example is what humans are doing to the world, changing it into a world for our use, without regard to the loss of natural systems and the feedback loops (many we still don’t understand). Adaro is an Indonesian company, the workers in these plants will be local cheap labour that benefits from this development in the short term. They will be able to afford food and medicine for their families.
This question is especially aimed at you Nick G, as the ‘cheapest’ economic means of powering the Aluminium smelters is via the coal fired electricity. Doing it with solar and pumped hydro (or batteries) is vastly more expensive, even in this place of a consistent 5.5hrs of sunshine/day.
Nick G you continually espouse that solar and wind are cheaper than coal, yet the coal powered development route is going to cost $US2B, while the solar set up needed would be over $US16B, before any batteries or pumped hydro backup, while the destruction of the rainforest is just more BAU (business as usual)..
Adaro is going ahead with this project, despite the extra CO2 poured into the atmosphere, because they have a market for the Aluminium, as demand for Aluminium keeps going up, especially to build more solar panels, but car manufacturers are also increasingly using Aluminium for the body of EVs as it cuts the weight down a bit..
This is a clear example of what humanity is doing, in the illusion of building a green sustainable future, right around the world, so let’s have your answer instead of the usual deflection you give about any of the downsides of this bright green future…
In my neck of the woods people with money are putting on a marvelous show of consumption. Just up the road from me a guy that lives in Canada and has a construction company there is building a 20 story residential complex on 2,500 m2 (half an acre) of land. He plans to name it after himself.
On Monday it was a public holiday here and I saw an Audi R8 speeding down the other side of the road. Lots of young people driving big, expensive SUVs. It seems we are pedal to the metal towards the cliff. If you took away all the renewables and EVs it seems people would still want to party like it’s 1999. Nobody seems to give a shit about the stuff you’re bitching and moaning about so I’ll take any good news I can get.
In science empirical evidence always trumps theory – i.e. there is a point when a theory has to be abandoned, and not just tweaked, because it repeatedly disagrees with observations. The theory that renewables will save us from overshoot is not working out. Almost everyday somebody posts a link to the latest and greatest EV technology or to statistics about how much electricity is generated from wind and solar and yet CO2 concentrations are going up faster than ever, no oil or gas projects are being abandoned, in fact time from development to start-up seems to be shortening, coal use is growing again, ecological habitat destruction is accelerating, pollution is beyond awful, etc. Maybe it’s time to abandon the theory. Renewables have been promoted as the answer to both climate change and resource depletion; so far both these have proved to be tar babies, i.e. difficult problems that are only aggravated by attempts to solve them. The real problem is overshoot, but even that is proximal as overshoot is inevitable when a species is given enough resources to overcome environmental limits, so you could say the real problem is the nature of species and the ultimate cause is three billion years of evolution – and how is that going to be solved? Virtue and status signalling, denial of reality, short term thinking, selfishness, tribalism, obfuscation etc. are what people do, even if they are evidently idiotic in the long term, because they have worked in the past to maximise their doer’s gene’s representation in the next generations. Overall there is not going to be a move towards behaviours where genes disappear from populations (i.e. voluntary downsizing) – the first genes to go will be the very ones that cause that behaviour, which will therefore stop. The least bad solution has always been an early and as gentle as possible crash to stop overshoot, but that is the very solution that every human has evolved to fight against.
I sometimes think back to the late 70s, when I was a young “environmentalist” and geology major (that wouldn’t last) who worked at a park picking up trash, who collected aluminum cans and recycled them to pay for my books at college, who drove a used VW and rode a bicycle to work and school whenever I could, who read Thoreau and Edward Abbey and Gregory Bateson and Loren Eiseley, who voted for Jerry Brown in the 1980 presidential primary election. I continued having hope right up through November of 1984, when it was announced that Ronald Reagan had been reelected President of the US. It wasn’t just a re-election, it was a landslide. The handwriting was clearly on the wall.
After that, I gave up the whole gig.
There is a young guy on Twitter with the same gung-ho attitude as you had. Here is a tweet from 6 hours ago where he records day #1712 off trash pickup somewhere in the Mojave I think:
https://twitter.com/edgarrmcgregor/status/1775545070281990171
Overall there is not going to be a move towards behaviours where genes disappear from populations (i.e. voluntary downsizing) – the first genes to go will be the very ones that cause that behaviour, which will therefore stop.
Genes that encourage reproduction mostly work by encouraging sex. But modern medicine has decoupled sex from reproduction. Additionally, declining infant mortality has reduced the incentive to have lots of children.
There are also economic considerations: The decline in child labor has made having children much more expensive. Meanwhile women have moved into labor markets, creating an opportunity cost for child care. And generally speaking, the better educated women are the fewer children they have, possibly because they take more control of their lives.
Human technology moves much faster than natural selection, which was initially rejected by many leading scientists because it is unimaginably slow. There’s no comparison. We are fat because sugar has gotten so cheap. We won’t evolve out of this, we’ll develop drugs to deal with it.
There are some religious nuts who think that having more babies will allow them to take over the world, but like all eugenics, this kind of idea is too short-lived to have any impact. Ideas come and go. Geneticists experiment on fruit flies because they reproduce quickly, before the grant runs out. Eugenicists die long before they can hope to see any results.
Population will decline because population growth is not really in anyone’s interest. Look at Japan, where my wife currently is, dealing with family matters. The village is dying fast. The country lost about 800,000 people last year alone. Everyone knows it, but it isn’t in anyone’s interest to do anything about it. Demagogues may rave about national decline, but that is putting groups before people, an idea that is hard to sustain.
‘The theory that renewables will save us from overshoot’
No one should harbor that ‘theory’, or expectation.
Nothing saves up from overshoot.
Nothing ‘saves’ us…not a messiah, not a prayer or a politician, and not a set of techniques.
And nothing saves the biosphere and its inhabitants other than the passage of time beyond when humans have left the scene.
NFE’s Non-Fossil Energies (formally sometimes called renewables) deployment does accomplish several things
-Can offset depleting fossil fuel. Some people think that is valuable
-Can provide energy with less CO2 emission/joule. Some people think that is a good thing
These two points are not complicated. I think most can comprehend a benefit to these things.
The next point is slightly more complicated, but important. Photovoltaics can be deployed by individuals, families, and communities at scale to provide most, or all, or even excess energy production if they live in a fairly sunny area which applies to most people of the world. This literal ’empowerment’ is a dramatic change in capability, no longer having to rely on a centralized monopoly of wealth sequestering authorities, governments or corporations.
For example, a family with an acre (43,560 sq ft) could devote less than 2% of the total area to PV and at an average site in the US produce 23.2 MWhr/y, compared to the average US household electrical consumption of 10.6 MWhr/y. Note that roughly 5 MW will get you 15,000 miles of driving.
This does not apply to those living in very cloudy areas. For those without personal space to deploy solar, you can pool your efforts with local community solar projects.
Hickory,
This whole debate about overshoot is one big red herring. A distraction. Defenders of fossil fuel are looking for one last excuse to keep oil & gas industry the way it is now. So, they argue that things are hopeless, so why pester the poor oppressed O&G industry? Just relax, and drill, baby drill.
They won’t admit that. They’ll claim they’re enormously concerned about the environment. But mysteriously, they don’t really want to do anything about climate change. Because, after all, fossil fuels really are the primary cause of climate change…
Let me rephase a bit : *some* of the debate about overshoot, especially here on POB lately, is a big red herring.
Roughly 2/3 of overshoot is due to fossil fuels.
https://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/analyzeTrends?type=earth&cn=5001
Roughly 75% of climate change is due to fossil fuels.
Anyone who claims to be concerned about overshoot should advocate for net-zero.
Anyone who claims to be concerned about climate change should advocate for net-zero.
Someone who raises concerns about overshoot or climate change, and who advocates *against* net-zero, is either recklessly negligent about informing themselves, or simply pretending concern. They may be trying to distract us all from the important questions, or simply trying to leave us too discouraged to do anything at all, but one way or the other they’re just defending fossil fuels.
Nick G, once again you fail to answer the question about building the Adaro Aluminium smelters, your constant deflection tends to indicate you are in favor of it because the world needs the Aluminium for solar panels and lighter EV car bodies.. More destruction of rainforests and burning of fossil fuels is what you are advocating with the bright green future, that’s not possible to transition to. Especially not possible for 8 billion+ humans ..
Did you bother to go and read Tom Murphy’s post on his Do The Math website??
Here is a proposition for you, we stop using all forms of fossil fuels tomorrow. Are you in favor of this? We have had solar and wind for well over 4 decades, my own first solar panel is 39 years old, and made a lot better than the newer cheaper ones, but $10/w even now doesn’t work and certainly didn’t back 1985 when $10/w was a lot of money…
Sometime tomorrow, in your city, the power will go off as no city is reliant 100% upon solar and wind power and the grid will fail or perhaps just have brownouts in different areas as voltage and frequency of the system become irregular, tripping circuit breakers all over the place.
No crews will get to reset these breakers as no fossil fuels are being used.
All food in fridges and freezers will need to be eaten quickly before it spoils, but after a couple of days, when you walk to the nearest shops, you find the shelves are bare.
Then a couple of days later after eating every skerrick of dry food in you house, you start to stave and go and try to find something to eat. Your pet pooch is starting to look delicious…
No food is getting to the city, the farmers have stopped harvesting as they don’t have any machinery that runs on non fossil fuels to gather food from paddocks. They do what they can by hand to feed themselves and family. Even if they had grain in the on farm silos, it isn’t going anywhere because there are no trucks transporting anything anywhere…
Before you start with the argument of not stopping tomorrow, but by 2040 or 2050 or whatever, remember this means ripping up a whole lot more rainforests to build Aluminium Smelters to build the world you envision. Because of cost they will burn cheap coal to produce the needed Aluminium. People and companies in Indonesia can’t afford to spend $US16-18B to buy solar panels, so will use the cheap source of energy to make the cheap Aluminium…
This is the world you are in favor of.. Burning more coal, oil and gas to build all the renewable waste (everything we build is waste after a period of time!!). Clear felling huge tracts of rainforest, sending more species extinct, to put up huge solar farms and the factories making them, and the mines mining the initial resources.. All for what end?? Another decade or so of modernity??
Once the fossil fuels are gone, so is the ability to do the mining in remote areas, and the high heat processes we use to make all aspects of modernity. We are not doing it with renewable electricity because it’s too expensive, like solar is to power the new Aluminium smelters…
What humanity needs to do is power down and reduce the massive overshoot of our population, something we should have been doing many decades ago. Massive degrowth is the only way to stop a devastating collapse that’s coming..
Business as Usual, meaning growth of any type, by any means, fossil fuels OR renewables is a guarantee of collapse..
You need to get off your high horse of assuming people against continued growth are in favor of fossil fuels. No we are not, because fossil fuels are leaving us anyway, they are a dead end, they are destroying, or already have destroyed our stable Holocene climate. Never ever have I ever said I’m in favor of fossil fuels, nor ever indicated that “drill baby drill” is an answer to anything.. Powering down and degrowth by design is the only way to prevent massive collapse, if it’s even possible because we have left it so late….
Renewable energy comes from unlimited, naturally replenished resources, such as the sun, tides, and wind. Renewable energy can be used for electricity generation, space and water heating and cooling, and transportation. Non-renewable energy, in contrast, comes from finite sources, such as coal, natural gas, and oil.
Renewable Energy
Department of Energy (.gov)
https://www.energy.gov › eere › renewable-energy
Thermal Batteries Are the Hottest New Thing in Energy Storage
By Haley Zaremba – Apr 03, 2024, 4:00 PM CDT
Thermal batteries are the latest innovation in energy storage, offering affordability and potential for decarbonization.
Thermal energy storage has the potential to contribute significantly to decarbonizing global heat and power and ensure an affordable, reliable, and efficient energy system.
Lack of publicity is the key bottleneck for industrial-scale thermal energy storage deployment.
The energy storage sector is on the verge of explosion. As leading economies around the world race to install more and more renewable energy production capacity, the nature of our energy landscape is changing, and the grid will need significant advances and infrastructural supports to keep up. One of these key supports is energy storage, which can manage and even out the variable flow of renewable energy to and from the grid. Due to its central role in energy security in an increasingly decarbonized world, the energy security sector could double in size over the course of 2024.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Thermal-Batteries-Are-the-Hottest-New-Thing-in-Energy-Storage.html
Huntingtonbeach, The renewable energy we use comes from man made machines called solar panels, or wind turbines. There is no electricity without these machines…
Plus the not so minor detail that coal, gas and oil are also natural energy sources that are just as free to mankind as sunshine, wind and tides…
We need to build machines to gain access to all of these energy forms to turn the energy into useful work.
To gain energy from wind turbines or solar panels requires 10 times the fully manufactured material input of coal, gas or oil machines to return a set quantity of useful energy, say 1Gwh over a short period of time. All these machines have a lifespan and must be replaced due to entropy.
Solar panels and wind turbines are exposed to the weather, making their lifetime of productive operation shorter than other machines obtaining energy from coal, oil or gas.
Solar and wind machines only give us electricity, intermittently.
Coal, oil and gas machines give us products, liquid fuels, high industrial heat and electricity.
Why is adaptability important to survival?
Without it, humans would have perished from this earth long ago. Adaptability is an evolutionary imperative: we learn, we grow, we adapt, we change, we keep moving forward – or we don’t survive as a species. The greatest challenge right now is that we’re having to do it so often and in all areas of our lives.
Why are humans so good at adapting?
Our ability to successfully adapt to such a diverse range of habitats is often explained in terms of our cognitive ability. Humans have relatively bigger brains and more computing power than other animals, and this allows us to figure out how to live in a wide range of environments.
As humans, we experience dramatically fewer hazards today than we did in our early evolution. However, genetic studies indicate that we are still evolving.
Huntingtonbeach, garbage and irrelevance to the topic..
Using more energy is what has allowed humans to grow and adapt to harsher climates. It’s always been MORE energy used, supplied by the natural world.
The future is going to be highlighted by LESS energy available to humans as we have used up the easy to get energy. Explain how humanity grows with LESS energy..
Seems to me that advocating for net-zero is a funny way to get a sense of control over a dilemna one has no control over. The global human enterprise exists in the size and configuration it has due to the sudden influx of fossil carbon energy and materials. There is no way to sustain this enterprise without fossil carbon energy. So depletion will bring an eventual reduction in inputs and reduce the size of the global human enterprise to say nothing of the downstream GHG consequences. Net zero by choice just doesn’t seem like something any animal or person would do. “No thank you, I’ve had enough horsepower, I’m fine driving my 30 hp automobile at 45 mph down the highway”. Or “Oh look, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I’ll just take one coin and leave the rest for others. I’ve never had a gold coin so one is surely more than enough”.
There is no way to sustain this enterprise without fossil carbon energy.
This is entirely unrealistic. I think you’ve been getting a perspective that’s unduly influenced by the oil industry. They naturally think that the world can only run on oil, and that Peak Oil means The End of The World As We Know It.
If oil were properly priced to include externalities, high cost oil might very well get no interest at all. Instead, oil consumption would be lower, and older, lower cost fields might well suffice. At the same time, higher efficiency and electrification of transportation would have long ago provided better and less expensive substitutes for high priced oil.
We *don’t* have a declining energy resource base. We are surrounded by an abundance of affordable energy: it’s only a question of our ingenuity in taking advantage of it. For instance, current human energy consumption is very roughly 12 terawatts. Well, the sun bathes the earth in 125,000 terawatts of continuous, very high quality energy!
The English in Roman times were surrounded by coal. Why didn’t they use it? It took time to develop the ingenuity to take advantage of it. In the same way, we’re surround by wind, solar and nuclear power. They are scalable, affordable, high energy-ROI, etc., etc. Their cost is declining quickly – they’re already affordable, and well on their way to being truly cheap, in a way that fossil fuels never truly were.
Nick G,
Once again, because you refuse to acknowledge it, oil, coal and gas are just as free to humanity as wind and sunshine. no ‘cost’ to any of them.
Humans need to build machines to harvest the energy, it’s all useless to modern civilization, unless we harness it, which takes making machines..
We need to process a lot more minerals to build the machines that harvest sunshine and wind (along with storage of energy), than we need to build machines to harvest coal, oil and gas for the same rate of work in civilization.
We build all these machines with fossil fuels. We have been building all these solar and wind machines for many decades. It has come while use of fossil fuels have increased. We are at record use of fossil fuels right now in 2024, despite all the decades of building more machines to harvest wind and sunshine energy.
If you want to ramp up production and deployment of solar and wind machines, it means more mining, more transport, more processing, all done with fossil fuels. It means more Aluminium smelters like the Adaro one’s in Borneo, burning more coal..
This is what you are in favor of, yet you don’t want to understand it, no matter how many times I explain it to you.
Nick, I’ll try again. Btw my perspective comes primarily from this community, TOD and POB.
The modern human enterprise grew to this size and configuration on fossil fuels. Yes we can build more solar/wind power generation, we have huge amounts of fat and negawatts to burn, but the mass of machinery, infrastructure and materials is fossil derived. We can change the electrical generation mix like you can vary your diet but you aren’t going to start digesting grass and wood products because your crops and animals declined in production. When the fossil energy input goes down this size of the human enterprise will shrink. Sure, all manner of accomodation will happen but the net supply will decline. And no one will be leaving accessibble energy in the ground because the demand, like your hunger continues, hour by hour.
Btw my perspective comes primarily from this community, TOD and POB.
Well, I’ve been commenting on TOD and POB for roughly 20 years(!), but most of my knowledge comes from working with this stuff, and doing general research outside these blogs.
You have to realize that TOD & POB are definitely not in the mainstream of science & engineering. Climate Change as a big risk for humanity? Definitely mainstream. Oil & FF depletion as an existential threat? Not so much.
Now, sure occasionally Galileo is right, and the mainstream is wrong. But more often than not that isn’t the case. If you’re looking at propositions that are far outside the mainstream you have to be far more cautious about accepting them without good, strong evidence. Remember the scientific rule of thumb: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The modern human enterprise grew to this size and configuration on fossil fuels… the mass of machinery, infrastructure and materials is fossil derived.
The next generation of infrastructure is built by the current generation. Oil wells were drilled by horses, and oil barrels were transported by horses as well. The few remaining contemporary horses are now transported with gas/diesel.
With time, wells were drilled and oil was transported using diesel. Some wells are already being pumped by solar power, and the last oil will be transported by renewably powered transportation.
And eventually wind and solar (and hydro, etc) equipment will be manufactured, transported and installed with renewably powered plants, vehicles and equipment.
In the long run, there isn’t anything we do now with fossil fuels that can’t be done with renewable power. Liquid fuels will still be convenient for some niche applications, but they don’t have to be derived from oil.
Hideaway
You are right on the money. A fast track to the cliff edge and the Cornucopians cannot see the wood for the trees, just big holes in the ground. iIguess that is where all the WT blades, PV panels and EV’s will finally end up.
Good luck with your challenge to provide a proof that we can rely on low cost unreliables to produce metals. Methinks we will be waiting a long time
I am just wondering when NickG and Alimibiquated are going to give us their masterclass in thermodynamics, especially Entropy. Neither managed to spot the schoolboy error in the G&R report on EV’s.
The other news of note is that Tesla’s sales were none too hot in Q1. Judging by the fall in the stock price I guess a few investors may be thinking G&R might be right.
Human individuals with a growth mindset see challenges as opportunities to learn and improve, fostering resilience and adaptability in the face of change. Embracing challenges, learning from setbacks, and viewing effort as a path to mastery are key aspects of a growth mindset that contribute to adaptability.
In evolutionary theory, adaptation is the biological mechanism by which organisms adjust to new environments or to changes in their current environment.
It’s easy to have a growth mindset in a world of rapid growth. A survival mindset is another thing.
The Next Gold Rush: Lithium Surge Creates New Investment Opportunities
U.S. lithium companies have the opportunity to become global leaders in lithium production and accelerate the transition to sustainable energy sources. This is particularly important as the demand for lithium is increasing every year.
EnergyX is on a mission to meet U.S. lithium demands using groundbreaking technology that can extract 300% more lithium from a source than traditional methods.
https://oilprice.com/Metals/Commodities/The-Next-Gold-Rush-Lithium-Surge-Creates-New-Investment-Opportunities.html
CARNOT —
LOL, trying to apply the 2nd Law to open systems is a chump’s game. On the the other hand, the Jesus freaks use it to prove Creationism.
So don’t let me hold you back. Knock yourself out. I could wrong, I could be right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq7JSic1DtM&ab_channel=PublicImageLimitVEVO
And may the road rise with you.
Ailibiquated
Wow, is that you masterclass on entropy. Clearly tyou have no idea what you are talking about. I will give you an easy example. Try any pneunmatic tool powered by compresed air. As the stored air in the tank runs down then work is done. This is an open system. When the air tank pressure equals the atmospehric pressure no more work can be extracted from the stored energy. Entropy will increase as the tank pressure depletes.
Entropy increases with a wind turbine. Think of all that disturbed air.
You might look at the book Thermodynamics for Dummies, but it might be a bit too technical for you.
Don’t know why I bother answering, but you can refill the tank because the system is open.
An the idea that wind turbines push the air around is a bit backwards. The wind pushes the turbines.
I find it rather strange that Carnot says “Entropy increases with a wind turbine. Think of all that disturbed air.”
There’s a continuous supply of solar energy flowing into the atmosphere. This pretty much renders entropy irrelevant in this context.
So long as the sun shines, there will be wind. Forever, as a practical matter.
Metal prices:
Lithium costs less than it did 7 years ago (earliest data).
Cobalt costs less than it did 10 years ago.
Aluminium: Today’s price is $2,370 per tonne. 10 years ago it was $1,711. A CAGR of 3.3% versus inflation of 2.7%.
Copper: A 10 year CAGR of 2.0%.
We have a problem with metal prices?
[CAGR = compound annual growth rate]
Data: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/aluminum etc
Wow, who would have thought?
CALIFORNIA LEADS US EMISSIONS OF SULFURYL FLUORIDE: STATE EMITS MORE THAN REST OF COUNTRY COMBINED
California, a state known for its aggressive greenhouse gas reduction policies, is ironically the nation’s greatest emitter of one: sulfuryl fluoride. “Other greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are found everywhere across the U.S. On our sulfuryl fluoride map, only California lit up like a Christmas tree.”
https://phys.org/news/2024-04-california-emissions-sulfuryl-fluoride-state.html
So, on and on it goes!
DESPITE GAINS IN BRAZIL, FOREST DESTRUCTION STILL ‘STUBBORNLY’ HIGH
The world lost 10 football fields of old-growth tropical forest every minute in 2023 and despite uplifting progress in the Amazon, the picture elsewhere is less rosy. “The world took two steps forward, two steps back when it comes to this past year’s forest loss,” said Weisse, director of WRI’s Global Forest Watch, which uses satellite imagery to aid its analysis.
https://phys.org/news/2024-04-gains-brazil-forest-destruction-stubbornly.html
Meanwhile,
WITH THE PLANET FACING A ‘POLYCRISIS,’ BIODIVERSITY RESEARCHERS UNCOVER MAJOR KNOWLEDGE GAPS
A scientific review has found almost no research studying the interconnections across three major threats to planetary health, despite UN assessments suggesting one million species are at risk of extinction, a global pandemic that resulted in over 6 million excess deaths, and a record-breaking year of global temperatures.
“There are misperceptions in the research community that more work in this area has already been done—but when you look for studies investigating the mechanisms linking the three crises, there isn’t much there at all.”
https://phys.org/news/2024-04-planet-polycrisis-biodiversity-uncover-major.html
“An estimated 180,000 gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees are at risk due to an increase in demand for critical minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt, a study has found.”
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/03/boom-in-mining-for-renewable-energy-minerals-threatens-africas-great-apes-aoe
As growth stalls and resources get sparse I think we’ll enter a new phase of habitat destruction where we give up any pretence of caring. Ultimately it will catch up to us with trophic cascades leading to massive famines, but it will be too late then. “What a piece of work is man?”
I think that DNA being just unstable enough to allow mutations to take hold at just about the right rate to produce the amazing complexity and incredible adaptions we have is the most fantastic thing the universe has produced and we are wiping out its greatest developments in a geological blink of an eye and they won’t ever come back the same. A cheetah’s speed, an octopuses nine brains, a duck billed platypus’s electric field, an eel’s life cycle, a tardigrade’s resilience (which might survive of course), etc. The most amazing fact of evolution that I’ve recently come across is that the shrinkage of a retile’s jaw bones to form part of the mammalian ear has happened at least four times independently, and converged on basically the same design.
The recent El Nino is waning and was weaker than those of 2016 and the late nineties and not enough to explain the temperature jump of the past twelve months. Sea surface and atmospheric temperatures are still well above 2023 numbers (i.e. setting daily maximum records) but the gap may be narrowing a bit (which will not be much comfort if you are trying to survive in the tropics at the moment).
After seven months of decline, FAO [Global] Food Price Index ticks up in March, mostly driven by higher world vegetable oil prices…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/rfk-jr-can-t-win-but-he-and-cornel-west-could-put-trump-back-in-the-white-house/ar-BB1l7hOY?cvid=5f9371a19f814dceb1d54d85c1f38dda&ei=83
Unfortunate that the minor candidates such as RFK Jr, Jill Stien and West may hand the White House to Trump.
In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism as “a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation” and that “The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#:~:text=Fascism (/ˈfæʃ,individual interests for the perceived
As stated before, I actually lived in Huntington Beach.
Anyone remember the Golden Bear?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Bear_(nightclub)#:~:text=The%20Golden%20Bear%20was%20a,just%20south%20of%20Main%20Street.
I moved and bought my home in HB in the summer 83. My brother in the late 80’s was part of an opening act as part of the group called the “Patterns”. It was just about the worse loud noise I had ever heard in my life. Had to try to cover my ears without being noticed. The Golden Bear was torn down a few years later. To this day I still swear the locals requested to the City Council to have the Golden Bear removed from downtown because of him.
Most days on the pier side of PCH and Main, MAGA hangs out with their flags and T-shirts promoting the Orange wonder. The last election, MAGA has also taken over the City Council and is having books like ” Everyone Poops” banned at the city library. All in the name of protecting the children.
https://twitter.com/daisykpgardner/status/1759435711328276515
I lived in Huntington in 1967.
The fact that republicans are still hot for trump, even after all that we have seen in the past 10 years, is an incredible damnation of our system of education,religion, and public discourse. Its a massive failure of human use of the most precious resource they/we have…its called a mind.
The most important quality of a president is character…things like integrity, good judgement, and restraint.
Trumps character traits would disqualify him from even being a boy scout troop leader, let alone a school principle. And yet about half of the country voters are willing to risk the country to him.
Its simply shameful.
He is an immoral psychopathic narcissist with no conscious or empathy,
Lets not degrade narcissist’s by comparing them to Trump.
In this world of so much social media, where people can just hear what they want, it all becomes self re-enforcing, so of course something like this has happened. Perhaps we can expect more in the future.
I agree it simply shameful, but sitting on the other side of the world, it’s kind of funny in an ironic sort of way. People here keep asking each other, How could Americans be so stupid?…
“People here keep asking each other, How could Americans be so stupid?…”
I guess Americans are like Germans in the 1930’s (for example). More gullible, stupid and delusional than you might expect. I was under the illusion that people might learn a bit from history.
I just spent two days with a team doing some work at the international airport in the resort city of Montego Bay. The airport is much busier than the other one in the capital city because it handles the vast majority of the tourist traffic and the majority of the resorts are on the north coast of the island. Traveling from the capital city to the resorts involves traversing the hilly interior of the island a journey that used to take a couple of hours before a 67 km four lane divided toll road was cofficially opened by the prime minister in March 2016.
A year an a half before the official opening, the segment going over the mountains in the center of the island was opened by the previous administration to much fanfare. The same Chinese state owned company that completed the highway has been doing most of the major road infrastructure improvement projects in the island with financing from the China Exim Bank something that has not gone unnoticed in the former colonial ruler of the island. (see Beijing highway: $600m road just the start of China’s investments in Caribbean) The issue has also raised concern in another former British colony see, Jamaica has China to thank for much-needed infrastructure — but some locals say it has come at a price
Back to my airport visit. Tourism is back! The airport was quite busy and on the approach to the airport there is a large billboard proclaiming “We are expanding to serve you better!” The company that has been contracted to do the expansion is a Chinese company that has been operating in the island for at least a decade. The airport is being operated by a Mexican company, Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico who have been investing heavily in solar PV, ostensibly to reduce their CO2 emissions. I think it has more to do with the fact that the savings on their electricity bill will pay off the investment in less than two years. The area where the team was working was right at the entrance to the airport complex and we couldn’t help but notice a steady stream of 40 foot tanker trucks delivering Jet A1 to the airport. The team leader remarked that one particular truck had made at least flour deliveries while we were there. Leads me to wonder why nobody has considered building a pipeline from the regional fuel depot 3.75 km away as the crow flies, from the airport jet A1 storage tanks.
Construction is booming in the Montego Bay area with a large new resort under construction on the eastern outskirts of the city and this news breaking this last January: Montego Bay welcomes US$350 million luxury skycraper project. Google Maps satellite images show that land is already being cleared at the location of the project and since the developers are a Chinese company it is very likely that it will be completed. Four 28 story residential towers, right on the sea shore in a island that is in an earthquake zone? What could possibly go wrong?
According to the Minister of Tourism, Jamaica Projected to Welcome 4.2 Million Visitors and Generate US$4.1B in Tourism Earnings for 2023/24. So there is a lot for Jamaicans to be positive about. The is a lot of money being spent on moving people and the stuff they consume around. This was brought home to me very clearly over the past couple of days. The only thing I see coming is more, more, more.
The idea of downsizing is very unpalatable so, downsizing is not going to happen by choice. That is why I advocate for measures that are not as much of a turn off for normal folks. Like the owners of the airport peoples eyes will light up when you tell them how much more money they will have available to spend (save) if they invest in solar PV or an EV. Tell them about the need for downsizing and overshoot and environmental disasters etc. and their eyes just glaze over and they tune you out. It is what it is!
Tell them about the need for downsizing and overshoot and environmental disasters etc. and their eyes just glaze over and they tune you out.
Which is why defenders of BAU and FF are delighted to have environmentalists talk about downsizing. It destroys environmentalists’ credibility, and BAU is a little safer.
If we want to prevent climate change and environmental risks, we should promote things that directly prevent or reduce climate change and environmental risks: downsizing is an enormously indirect, clumsy and destructive approach to this.
Everytime someone talks about downsizing, an angel gets his wings in far right heaven…(see “It’s A Wonderful Life”)
————
Slightly different phrasing for the same idea:
I think a large portion of those talking about degrowth are actually conservatives who are trying to prevent change by discrediting environmentalists. If they can associate a transition away from fossil fuels with a decline in living standards then they can make the whole idea of moving away from fossils look bad.
———
3rd way of saying the same thing:
Talking about “Accepting a smaller economy” is highly unrealistic: it would be less effective, and far more disruptive and politically difficult. I mean, think about it: if you simply reduce the economy by 50%, you might reduce GHG emissions by 50%. Well, why not reduce them by 80%, which is what you’d get by eliminating fossil fuels and replacing them with renewables (agriculture is the other 20%).
And, of course, we need to deal with agricultural GHG emissions: a very large part of that come from beef, which could be mostly replaced with plant-based ground beef without anyone noticing much change.
Those two things: renewables and plant-based ground beef, would probably reduce GHGs by 95%. That last 5% would be harder, but whatever we used to deal with it (sequestration, tree planting, mineral erosion, etc) would be infinitely easier and less disruptive than reducing the size of the economy.
Similarly, if you’re concerned about preserving wildlife, push for much larger parks and conservation areas. That’s E.O. Wilson’s proposal, and it’s far more direct and effective and feasible than reducing the size of the economy (or population).
Not sure where my comment disappeared to…
Nick G, why do you think those of us that can clearly see the BAU approach by a different means, just means more overshoot, are in favor of fossil fuels??
Those promoting renewables, EVs, batteries everywhere are the ones promoting more fossil fuel use to build it all. None of it pops into existence, it has to be made and built from minerals mined then processed. Why do you always ignore this step?
The Adaro new Aluminium Smelters in Borneo are a metaphor for what’s happening to build your bright green future. It means more destruction of the environment to ‘save’ modern civilization.
Burn the coal or destroy the rainforest to erect solar panels and dam the pristine river system to have pumped hydro backup.
Your promotion of wanting more material goods, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, EVs are all material goods, that must be made and have a limited lifetime. It all comes from MORE fossil fuel use, and then when replaced, it has to be replaced by greater fossil fuels use, mining lower grade ores.
We have backed ourselves into a corner with modernity, always demanding more, with humanity as a whole going into massive overshoot. Despite our supposed intelligence, as we change our environment negatively, we falsely believe that doing more of the same at an accelerated rate will solve the predicament we caused.
Interesting report, thanks. Building towers in earthquake zones is a pretty solved problem, as a visit to Japan will prove, so that is the least of your worries, if they are being built to any kind of reasonable standard.
“Like the owners of the airport peoples eyes will light up when you tell them how much more money they will have available to spend if they invest in solar PV or an EV.”
Jevons paradox at work….
Jevon’s paradox was developed when the coal industry was new. A very young industry can be very expensive, and efficiency improvements & price reductions can allow the industry to expand dramatically. It doesn’t apply to mature industries like electric, gasoline, or energy in general.
The effect of Jevon’s is quantified by the elasticity of demand, and is expressed as a dimensionless parameter (meaning it’s a ratio of two items with the same dimension: fuel consumed per fuel saved, basically). That parameter is about .3 for electricity (the last time I looked), and probably lower for liquid fuel. So: if the electricity consumption falls and causes the price of electricity to drop by 10%, other consumption might be expected to rise by 3%.
Ask yourself: if the price of fuel goes down by 20%, are you going to run out and use more? Not likely. That is only likely if your consumption was sharply constrained by pricing in the first place, but fuel consumption is a secondary consideration mostly dictated by activity, and not the other way around (which also says something about the old correlation of GDP with oil consumption: economic activity drives energy use, not the other way around).
So, long story short: your efficiency or conservation is extremely helpful to the world!
HEAT-TRAPPING CARBON DIOXIDE AND METHANE LEVELS IN THE AIR LAST YEAR SPIKED TO RECORD HIGHS AGAIN
The levels of the crucial heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere reached historic highs last year, growing at near-record fast paces, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Carbon dioxide, the most important and abundant of the greenhouse gases caused by humans, rose in 2023 by the third highest amount in 65 years of record keeping. NOAA Scientists are also worried about the rapid rise in atmospheric levels of methane, a shorter-lived but more potent heat-trapping gas. Both jumped 5.5% over the past decade.
“Methane’s decadal spike should terrify us,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who heads the Global Carbon Project that tracks worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide but wasn’t part of NOAA’s report. “Fossil fuel pollution is warming natural systems like wetlands and permafrost. Those ecosystems are releasing even more greenhouse gases as they heat up. We’re caught between a rock and a charred place.”.
https://phys.org/news/2024-04-carbon-dioxide-methane-air-year.html
Thanks Hideaway for continuing to draw our attention to the Adaro plant in Borneo. Seems like it’s controversial:
The project was being marketed as a flagship green, renewable development for the south-east Asian economy, even though it appeared to involve building a 2.2 GW coal power plant. Adaro Minerals was planning to expand into aluminum and battery making for electric vehicles, but most of its revenue was still from coal.
https://www.gem.wiki/Adaro_Aluminum_Smelter_power_station
And to answer your question, no, I wouldn’t build the coal power stations but wait for the hydro. If this results in an increased price for aluminium, so be it. We’ll adapt.
John Norris, Even the hydro dam, which is only a 30% of what they really plan to do, means the destruction of a pristine rainforest river, all in the effort of going green…
Oh well, at least we can say that our winters are warmer now!
THE MAJORITY OF FOSSIL FUEL COMPANIES PRODUCE MORE EMISSIONS AFTER PARIS AGREEMENT THAN BEFORE
Most fossil fuel companies have produced more emissions in the seven years since the Paris Agreement was signed than the seven years before the major climate pact, a new report reveals. It found that 80 per cent of the fossil fuel and cement emissions since the Paris Agreement have come from just 57 producers. State-owned oil producer Saudi Aramco has produced the most carbon emissions since the Paris Agreement, making up 4.8 per cent of global emissions.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-05/small-cohort-of-mega-polluters-produce-most-of-greenhouse-gas/103669772
So, is burning more coal to charge EVs (or run air conditioners) progress?
CHINA, INDIA BOOST SEABORNE THERMAL COAL IMPORTS AS POWER DEMAND SURGES
China and India lifted imports of seaborne thermal coal to three-month highs in March as the world’s two biggest buyers took advantage of lower international prices of the fuel to meet strong domestic power demand.
China’s electricity demand is being boosted by a variety of factors, INCLUDING INCREASING ELECTRIFICATION OF THE VEHICLE FLEET, higher demand from air conditioners and appliances, and increased electrification of industrial processes, such as some types of smelting.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-india-boost-seaborne-thermal-coal-imports-power-demand-surges-russell-2024-04-02/
Is RJK Jr gonna be stealing Dim votes? I believe Dennis indicated that his presence on the ballot is a boon for Trump.
RFK definitely does not appeal to the MSNBC crowd. I’ve listened to him and he appears far more likely to appeal to Trump’s base. As Bernie Sanders is fond of saying, a lot of what has ended up as the Democratic platform appeals to the majority of the American electorate. It’s the very rich GOP donors that are creating the opinion that voters are against many of the things like reigning in Big Pharma and the rich paying their fair share of taxes.
Cheers IB
His VP pick is certainly an attempt to peal off the democratic vote.
He’ll grab enough of both party votes to put up a wildcard effect.
I do think that trumps base is more committed to the man in kind of a religious fanatical way,
so I think the overall affect is much more helpful to trump.
All it takes is one state to be swayed by a few thousand votes.
Cheers Hick, I hadn’t considered the VP pick. Speaking of VPs, KH is fire. Pro choice/Abortion rights are a massive motivator to show up at the polls; VP Harris is on it.
I know that many (most?) people would like different candidate choices and additional parties.
Our choice has always been to vote against the worst choice (Trump this time around),
with us left then having to vote for a candidate with what we generally consider to have both sub-optimal policy positions and flawed persona (after all they have always been humans… so far).
Such is any system where you have the luxury of a choice.
If we are ever to have a successful third party emerge I assert that it will come from a sane middle, if we can find such a thing and person to represent that neglected ground.
A successful alternative won’t come from ‘progressives’ or from the Maga/tea party/evangelical wing of the country. And it won’t come from those who are from the weird intersections of these two extremes…such as anti-vaxxers, secessionists, science deniers, god enforcers, or conspiracy hounds.
I think Kennedy falls in to that latter category. No wonder his family will vote against him.
It will be yet another example of wasted votes, votes that may very well empower the worst of us.
Survivalist,
Given that many Americans would vote for Trump, they are on average not very bright, or at minimum are not students of history (or are perhaps fond of fascists).
In any case consider a voter who bothers to go to the polls and like many in the US is not well informed. The voter is not particularly fond of Trump, but thinks Biden as done a lousy job, they see this RFK fellow on the ballot and thinkm, hey Kennedy might not be bad (if they are at all left of center), these are voters who would otherwise vote for the Democratic nominee as the right of center folks would vote for the Republican nominee, also those in the middle who are uninformed might choose RFK as well (though in this case RFK might take equal votes from Trump or Biden). Keep in mind in swing states it might be 5000 voltes separating the winner and loser and a third part candidate can make a difference as it did in 2000 and in 2016.
Cheers Dennis, I would have thought RFK appeals to the Qanon/Pizza gate/anti establishment-mystic crowd, who seem to otherwise prefer Trumps rhetoric. I feel RFK will diminish Trumps vote count, not Biden’s.
It’s perhaps worth remembering that Trump didn’t win the popular vote in 2016 or 2020; and he likely won’t in 2024 either.
I feel electoral politics is more about motivating your voters to show up at the polls, and less about swaying their opinions. IMHO nothing motivates female voters more than a VP Kamala Harris pro choice speech.
Survivalist,
Popular vote nationwide is irrelevant, the election will be decided by a very narrow group of undecided voters in 4 to 6 states Pennsylvannia, Michigan, Wisconson, and Georgia and maybe Arizona and Nevada as well. RFK’s actual views seem to coincide more with the MAGA crowd, but most of them will vote for Trump, a large majority of those undecided voters probably don’t pay attention and may associate the Kennedy name with more left wing political views, many of those who might have chosen Biden, but aren’t paying attention or listen to the mainstream media that points to Biden being the reason for inflation, but give no credit to him for the lowest unemployment for such a long period (under 4% for 24 months straight) since 1967, may choose RFK because they know nothing about his views.
Cost of reshoring EV battery industry from China to US: $584 billion and an Opportunity Cost problem(YouTube)
Everybody outside of China has a problem. Spend the time, money and effort to re-shore as much of these critical new industries as they can or be content to depend on China for basically all your stuff!
Chart of the Day: Solar overtakes coal in biggest coal state in US
Some of the regulars here insist that we might as well give up on renewable electricity, etc, because scaling it up necessarily involves a substantial amount of damage to the environment.
This is quite obviously true, and in some cases this damage will be in addition to the usual damages caused by industrialization. A lithium deposit in a wilderness area might never be mined if the lithium isn’t needed for a gazillion ev batteries.
But leaving it in the ground isn’t going to help very much, if it helps at all, in terms of preserving the environment. If we don’t go green, the odds not far from one hundred percent that we’re going to burn every last barrel of oil we can get out of the ground, every cubic meter of gas we can get out of the ground, every tree that’s available within a few hundred miles of a power plant, etc. The only thing, other than going green, that’s likely to stop us from doing so is a world wide crash and burn economic and ecological collapse.
Nobody other than a very few true believers of the green sort will ever voluntarily give up his or her modern day lifestyle. That’s totally out of the question. No politician will ever propose such a course of action.
But it’s been amply demonstrated that the general public and plenty of businessmen of various sorts are willing to put tons of money and manpower into building wind and solar infrastructure out the ying yang.
And so far as I can see, the only reason we won’t continue to building out these industries is that the necessary raw materials may be unavailable in the necessary quantities. It’s quite obvious that given the fact that renewable electricity, once the infrastructure is in place, is produced on a fuel free basis as a practical matter, and that producing it on the grand scale is pretty much a no brainer given that oil and gas deplete, and that most of the remaining supply belongs to countries and people who to put it very mildly are not necessarily anybody’s friends.
This argument holds true in general terms even though renewable electricity is intermittent and that we may never fully solve the associated storage issue …… when we build in places with a good wind and solar resource.
Of course we’re going to have to maintain a lot of existing and possibly build some new gas fired capacity, and maybe some coal capacity as well, for at least three or four decades, maybe a lot longer, and we will have to work this out so that the cost of maintaining this standby capacity is paid for, one way or another, with the cost being passed on to the end use customers.
Nobody here who says doing it will cost too much seems to have anything to say about how much we can save on armies, navies, and air forces, or how much LESS electricity we can use if we put some real effort into conservation and efficiency, etc.
Nor do the naysayers give any much in any weight to the fact that the population will be peaking and falling in the not so distant future, or to the fact that we can build just about every thing involved in these industries so that when stuff wears out, it can be recycled…… including wind turbine blades.
OFM, we both believe we are going into further massive overshoot until we eventually collapse. There is no current evidence that we will leave any of the available fossil fuels in the ground either.
If we try to continue to ‘grow’ the human enterprise, whether with fossil fuels or solar and wind, we do more damage to the environment, either way. Because we build all the solar and wind machines and storage with fossil fuels, we need more use of fossil fuels to build more of them, it’s a Catch 22 anyway. Assuming we can keep growing fossil fuel use for another decade, we will indeed build out a huge amount of solar and wind machines, causing huge further damage to the environment in the process, from burning the fossil fuels to build it, to the vast areas cleared for mining and siting all the solar and wind machines.
All it does is mean the total energy ‘use’ in 10 years time will be much higher, so the base we aim for in building solar and wind machines will be higher, meaning more mines needed, more land cleared for the energy collection machines, in a never ending spiral of more!! Population is not going to decline for many decades under BAU scenarios. Population decline is not going to help us any time soon, especially with only 15% of humanity ‘enjoying’ modern civilization. Western countries keep importing people so are growing anyway..
Once we get well past peak fossil fuel production, building of anything will become much more difficult, as we just wont have the energy available to do it. Who wins the energy race in modern civilization in competition for diminishing energy?
Will the energy go to farmers, or heavy transport, or mining, or manufacturing, or building? Where does the reduction in energy available come from? Is it government directed or free market? When discretionary businesses go bust due to lack of customers as living costs (food, energy, health, govt taxes) all rise, how are those out of work fed?
Where does the money and energy come from when we are in serious fossil fuel decline? Who do you take energy off, to build ‘anything’, let alone recycling plants or more wind and solar mines and factories?
The bright green future looks easy, providing you use a series of hand waves, we’ll just build …… (fill in the blank with whatever), never considering where the energy comes from to do it, in a world where energy is declining rapidly.
It’s a situation totally different to anything we’ve experienced over the last 200 years, while we have had massive and growing energy availability. No-one has lived through a time of year after year decline in energy and therefore material availability, except for perhaps people that live in Lebanon or Sri Lanka or similar places..
Now tell me how much energy in places like Lebanon are going into building recycling factories, without outside help?? Once we are in energy decline, worldwide, there can be no ‘outside’ help.
Humanity as a whole has made the choice to go into hard, fast civilizational collapse once we have accelerating fossil fuel (oil in particular) decline, no matter what the cost to the environment. By denying there is a problem by promoting ‘renewables’ then we just fall from a greater height with more damage to the natural world when it happens.
“By denying there is a problem by promoting ‘renewables’ then we just fall from a greater height with more damage to the natural world when it happens.”
Interesting stance that you take, as an elderly person who in is a member of a cohort of less than 5% of the global population and who has lived high on the fossil fuel energy hog for the past 70 years. And now you want tell the younger 95% that they should stand down…and get used to living in some degree of energy poverty. That they should not make attempts to provide themselves with non-fossil energy to supplement fossil energy consumption as the supplies decline.
Of course all of the industrial endeavors of mankind are destructive to the environment, even more so after the routine deployment of metal making became widespread.
But here we are, with metal and plastic and explosives and solvents and nuclear fission…. and approaching 8.2 billion individuals.
This is not some theoretical discussion. We left the garden of eden before we even were an ‘officially designated’ species. Collectively, humans around the world are going to go ahead and work hard to replace depleting fossil fuels. The peak of human population, of carbon emissions, and of industrial activity is on the horizon…a decade or four from now depending on which indicator you are specifying.
If you really cared about the biosphere as a priority you would have ceased and desisted from the destruction beginning in the 1970’s when you became aware of the issue.
Hickory … “If you really cared about the biosphere as a priority you would have ceased and desisted from the destruction beginning in the 1970’s when you became aware of the issue.”
Pretty sure you have no idea what I’ve been doing for the last few decades. It’s interesting how you choose the ‘shoot the messenger’ response.
It doesn’t change the reality of us being in massive overshoot one iota. Every one of us that uses a computer is part of the problem, so yes I’m part of the overall problem, but one person stopping use of as much modernity as possible, also makes practically zero difference in the big picture. Someone else will just use those resources. It’s only by humanity as a whole understanding the massive problem we have created, that it becomes even slightly possible to do anything about it.
The constant denial by some, of any problem, and just destroy MORE nature to build MORE (solar, wind, nuclear, coal, gas, oil, EVs or whatever) by others, as any type of solution is exactly what guarantees massive collapse.
The blame game is the easy out for most people, instead of realising that it’s our collective actions over many generations, to make our life better (in our minds), to the detriment of all other life on the planet. I expect a whole lot more of the blame game happening in the future leading to resource wars, it’s what we have done historically.
Humanity simply can’t survive without other life, and a smart species would eventually realise we have to stop growth before we destroy our home, plus the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet.
Perhaps humanity is just not that smart overall.
Good response from Hickory
We are probably going from the industrial economy being able to give a devastating punch like in Great Britain late 1800 century, WW2 USA or China early this century, to just producing slow jabs not quite enough for everything. The maintenance economy would mean that not all infrastructure could be rebuilt or maintained at wish, but rather get prioritised.
The main point being how much more easy it is to maintain something that is already planned for orginally and set into a system like renewables, water supply, the grid, renovation and many more basic services (and not at least real estate) compared to starting from scratch would be very substantial. And it helps tremendously when adapting to not having an industrial iron fist, but rather a slow jab some decades ahead.
And even though a “slow jab” does not sound great, a large renewables sector have the advantage of actually having a long term energy solution. The critics aim at the machinery and production necessary to keep renewables up and that it would fail. First, everything will fail due to a collapse in fossil fuel production. Not just renewables. Second, renewable energy production would then fall at low rate due to infrastructure mostly being in place. The idea that we can not be inventive in a decline phase is just not very good. Replace super magnets with regular magnets, turbine blades made in glass fiber to other materials, get enough copper and aluminium recycled, have a plan for enough rubber. And also add in all possible energy storage innovation solutions coming. We would have plenty of fire power to play around that for some decades, but it requires a grid system that already have been implemented or are close to be finished (in 2030-40 max?) to handle the load.
The high share renewable economy compared to a fossil fuel based one is possible according to experts. Cutting out fossil fuel is not really the question since we will still have the burning of more current biomass and some degree of historical biomass.
everything will fail due to a collapse in fossil fuel production. Not just renewables.
I’m so puzzled by this proposition. It makes no sense. Land transportation, construction machinery, all of the motors that use diesel can be electrified, and TCO will be less than existing FF burning equipment. Aviation and water transportation are harder, of course, but even if synthetic liquid fuels are more expensive they’d still allow aviation: make jet fuel 2 or even 3 times more expensive, and flying might get 50% more expensive, and you’d get a little less vacation travel. Not a big deal. And water transportation would be relatively easy to power with H2, ammonia, methanol, etc.
50 years ago this was a somewhat reasonable concern, but now??
The best argument for collapse is that our financial institutions are complex and fragile, and can’t stand the stress of sudden change. I agree that’s….conceivable. Heck, we saw the Great Depression because the banking system couldn’t handle the pace of industrialization and consolidation of farms, and we came pretty close to a big failure in 2008 due to a sudden reversal of home building, causing a sudden credit crunch. But, there’s not really a good reason to expect a complete collapse, from which recovery isn’t possible. We had a similar “collapse” in 1929 – it was very painful, but it was reversible. In fact, hard times in farm communities actually accelerated investment in tractors and increased farm labor productivity.
Certainly not a collapse caused by a lack of energy. The US, for instance, could easily reduce the impact of reduced oil supplies by reducing oil consumption by 25% overnight with aggressive conservation, carpooling, etc. Look at what was done in WWII – domestic oil consumption was reduced dramatically to support the war effort.
And, we have better and cheaper alternatives right at hand, ready for investment and ramping up of production. In the short term reduced buying of ICEs might hurt the economy, but in just a few years EVs would stimulate the economy.
The idea that a lack of oil will cause the economy to collapse, either fast or slowly, is a bogeyman. It works nicely for the oil companies, who want to push for “drill, baby drill”, but it doesn’t make sense.
And a slow collapse makes even less sense than a fast collapse: a slower rate of change would make adaptation much, much easier.
Nick G, you totally miss the point again, or is it still?
” all of the motors that use diesel can be electrified”
In a world of declining energy availability, when oil production is in actual decline year after year, where does the energy come from to build the mines and factories to do all this replacement on a civilizational level? The copper ore grades are declining now, so how do you get copper for this great electrification?
The transition away from all this diesel machinery is not happening now, while we still have fossil fuel growth, so how can it possible happen in fossil fuel decline??
All your hand wavy comments about ”we can do this with electricity”……… ignore the reality that we have not done it over the last 200 years, so expecting us to transfer over with way less energy available defies physics among other realities..
The ‘new’ copper mines we will have to build are in remote locations of lower ore grades, it’s not just an easy ‘hand wave’ to gain access to these minerals…
Nick G
The financial collapse scenario is as you describe; if prices move too quickly there is a problem. That does not necessarily have to happen anytime soon.
When it comes the energy transition I have “bought” into narrative that the fossil fuel dependecy is a scale problem. If it is 1/5 of what I think it is, I am increasingly buying into your thinking and solutions. Reading Vaclav Smil books and following oil and gas industry for 20-30 years have influenced my opinion.
What do you think have been the most useful ideas from Vaclav Smil?
I have never read a comment that suggests we should “give up” on renewables by anyone; mostly people are just pointing out that renewables are not really doing what their proponents are asserting. The next time you post one of these screeds on the subject could you provide a quote please. My main objection is to EV “passenger” vehicles, which hardly ever carry any more than a driver cocooned in ultimate comfort in several hundred kilograms of various materials, and which I think are mostly a rich man’s virtue signal (and based on all the data and current trends are doing nothing to slow resource over exploitation or climate change, but might be doing a lot of good for their owners mate finding success). My guess is their loudest cheerleaders have intestines that turn liquid at the merest thought of sharing a seat with the hoi polloi on a bus or tram. However my opinion isn’t going to change anything, see below, I just find the constant boosting of the latest trivial and banal technological breakthrough as if it is some kind of game changing manna instead of another nail in civilisation’s coffin, as a bit tedious.
From my perspective we do not have free will and therefore what is going to happen has already been predetermined although presently unknown and unknowable. Statements like “giving up on …”, “we need to …” and “we would be stupid to …” are meaningless because they assume our decisions are conscious and logical, In fact our higher brains mostly just solve day to day problems of survival and reproduction or are used to post rationalise behaviours that are driven from our limbic system and have been programmed by billions of years of evolution to maximise our reproductive success – i.e. to get our genes into our children and ensure they make it through to a reproductive age of their own. You trumpet the falling birth rate but a lot of that is because, instead of having many children and hoping a couple make it, we are now having fewer but investing many more resources in them, with the result that the overall environmental footprint from having children grows.
“If we don’t go green, the odds not far from one hundred percent that we’re going to burn every last barrel of oil we can get out of the ground,”
Are you kidding?
If “we” DO go “green,” there is “one hundred percent chance that we’re going to burn every last barrel of oil we can get out of the ground.”
Because “green” ain’t green, goddamnit, although the multitudes pretend it is.
Quiet right. Although if we do “Go Green” there’s perhaps a slight chance we’ll take better care and maybe ours and other species will claw through it. Into eternity.
‘Green’ is a non-useful term when it comes to things that humans do.
We erase or diminish green, by and large.
Get over it…. the terminology issue.
Call it ‘Lesser Black’ if that seems more accurate.
Acapulco Gold was really a just shade of green (no stems…no seeds).
Wildfire Overview 2023
The Impact of Climate Capacity and Change
https://tinyurl.com/3r9sfj7a
Interesting analysis of DJT aka Trump Media
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntobey/2024/04/07/a-disappointing-trump-media-stock-djt-analysis/?sh=3b2587b22994
Looks like book value is around $1.88 per share.
3/26 was at $73, now at $36: there is some justice in the world.
Down 10.4% so far today…
Xiaomi Triggers a Price War with Tesla with EV Launch | Vantage with Palki Sharma (YouTube)
China is set to dominate manufacturing of EVs and will drive legacy auto out of business! This video includes a segment about the launch of the latest smart phone on wheels from smart phone manufacturer Xaomi. This is not a joke! The Chinese government is behind this!
“Apollo’s Leon Black says he is so wealthy he didn’t know he’d paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 million”
This dude needs to be in a higher tax bracket
That’s funny. And really true.
Higher tax bracket on all income sources that aren’t wages for work,
and this country needs a massive increase in estate taxation.
Or without empathy we could join The Cult, watch Fnews and fall inline with the rich Republican propaganda capitalist slave machine
Hickory,
I agree, though I’d include wages in the higher tax brackets, or they would become a loophole.
CEOs (or anyone) paid more than $1M per year should be in a pretty high tax bracket.
Yes, need to insert a little complexity to exclude loopholes.
Elizabeth Warren is the US legislator who has become a leading expert of the policy issues around this. I was disappointment that she didn’t gain traction in the last election round.
You can look up her stance to get an idea of what a good policy in this area looks like.
New science has taken a deep dive into plastic waste, providing the first estimate of how much ends up on the sea floor. Australia’s national science agency, and the University of Toronto in Canada, estimates up to 11 million tonnes of plastic pollution is sitting on the ocean floor.
Every minute, a garbage truck’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. With plastic use expected to double by 2040, understanding how and where it travels is crucial to protecting marine ecosystems and wildlife.
Dr Denise Hardesty, Senior Research Scientist with CSIRO, said this is the first estimate of how much plastic waste ends up on the ocean floor, where it accumulates before being broken down into smaller pieces and mixed into ocean sediment.
https://www.csiro.au/news/All/News/2024/April/Ocean-floor-a-reservoir-for-plastic-pollution-world-first-study-finds
“Reconductoring”….yep, its spelled intentionally that way.
“Reconductoring existing US power lines could quadruple new transmission capacity by 2035.
Reconductoring projects typically cost less than half the price of
new lines for similar capacity increases.”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/reconductoring-power-lines-transmission-capacity-goldman-gridlab/712643/
https://www.2035report.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GridLab_2035-Reconductoring-Technical-Report.pdf
I didn’t realize that electrical transmission lines weren’t copper based. “The most common conductor [cable] in use for transmission today is aluminum conductor steel reinforced (ACSR).”
Yeah, one of the reasons that copper scarcity is pretty unlikely to be a major problem is that roughly 95% of its uses has good substitutes – mostly aluminum.
So you agree that we need lots more Aluminium, like the smelters being built by Adaro in Indonesia, using coal fired power to do it, because it’s so much cheaper than solar and backup (around 1/10 of the cost). But even solar in their location near the equator will require the destruction of hundreds of square kilometers of pristine rainforest to build and pristine rainforest river systems.
If you are against the Adaro development, coal or solar, then where does the Aluminium come from?? Which other natural system do you want destroyed for the new Aluminium smelters? Which landscape is acceptable to you, too destroy, for this extra placement of solar and wind??
It’s the constant notion that we need MORE, of anything that’s the problem. We are in deep overshoot and the only possible solution is less, not more, so every time you utter the concept of more (anything) you should know it’s the wrong answer, straight away.
It doesn’t matter what the form of energy is as the concept of MORE is what has put our planetary home at risk, climate, ecosystems, ocean life, etc, so EVERY answer that comes up with a solution of MORE is just a continuation of the problem.
How on Earth doesn’t it occur to you that we’ve been on the path of ‘mitigation’ of the climate symptom of our overshoot for several decades, by building mountains more ‘stuff’ (wind turbines, solar panels, EVs batteries, changing coal to gas fired power plants, etc), yet the entire time we have only made the situation worse by every metric?
How can the solution possibly be doing more of the same??
A new Open Thread Non-Petroleum has been posted.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-april-9-2024/
An updated December World Oil Production report has been posted.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/december-world-oil-production-at-post-pandemic-high/