The main action advocated by the author here is to increase efficiency (in insulation, appliances, food production, transportation) as a means to curb CO2 emissions and slow climate change - all very important. Lately I've been reading Saul Griffith's book "Electrify" which proposes a different tack - "simply" electrify all energy usage and let people maintain their current lifestyles exactly. Interestingly, doing so would reduce total US energy consumption[0] to about half its current levels while still allowing big trucks and air conditioning and fun energy-intensive things. A lot of that energy reduction comes from a) the higher intrinsic efficiencies of electrical machines and generation compared to heat engines and b) no longer needing energy to run fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and refining processes.
Griffith is also careful to note that climate solutions are "yes ands", so we should increase efficiencies as much as we can in addition to electrifying as much as we can (and also pursuing ambitious strategies like fusion and CCS). Definitely make a great case of rolling out existing solutions like solar and wind in a big way to bring down carbon emissions really quickly.
[0] - the book focuses only on the US, but results could be similar in countries with similar economies.
It's much easier to maintain lifestyles by being more efficient than by any other means. Most energy is simply wasted. There is basically no downside to things like properly insulating houses (except perhaps the bottom line of the property developers).
There isn't--if you can get materials. And afford them. The windows in my house are starting to go. I've probably got another five years or so before they're a problem, but they were the most obvious future expenditure when I bought the place. The windows that best hit the durability and insulation points that I expect, for living here for the next 10-15 years, are around $1100 apiece. $1800 for the bigger one in the middle of the bay window on the first floor.
Oh, and they also have a 9 month lead time, if you're lucky!
And this is after I've spent five figures opening every wall, heavily insulating the place, and buttoning it back up.
I'm not complaining personally; I can afford this okay, but it's impractical to expect even moderately well-off Americans to be able to. This isn't just about the bottom line of developers, 'cause most housing stock is already owned. We're probably looking at massive subsidies to make it happen, and significant resistance because doing it is a huge imposition (one I did willingly, but I knew I was getting into it) reliant on limited labor and materials.
Electrification requires energy-efficiency savings. Insulation is specifically an absolute no-brainer - it's cheap and save a lot of energy (and money). Currently it seems that rentals are the issue more than anything.
Insulation is a no brainer until you pump it into an older house with poorly sealed walls and end up with a sodden mess next time it rains. Some of the best advice from "green" building professionals is focus on air sealing, efficient electric heat (heat pumps), and eventually rooftop solar. These have complications as well (slave labor solar panels, high gwp refrigerants) but those are often easier to fix than your 1930s wall assembly. The individual cost of a deep energy retrofit to address the systemic problems with a home can be incredibly high (100k+ for people like me in California), so hopefully market innovation and government regulation will help solve some of the issues I mentioned with electrification + rooftop pv.
I don't think it does. In principle, you could stay relatively inefficient with low cost to the climate as long as you were drawing power from overprovisioned wind and solar. Of course, that energy may be better spent elsewhere so efficiency is critical, but we can't get carbon emissions down to zero by only increasing efficiency of systems that ultimately draw power from coal and natural gas power plants.
"Fighting Climate Change" is all sunshine and rainbows and photovoltaics until you realise that the messaging has been thoroughly usurped by an anti-civilisation regressive agenda. They don't want people using cleaner energy; they primarily want people using less energy; they sell that goal with promotion of "eco" and "green" etc.
I want us to use more AND cleaner energy; one without the other is a civilisation-level failure.
Why is using more energy important to you? Wouldn’t more efficient energy use equate to getting more production out of less fuel? That seems like a clear win to me.
Pointing to a vague they makes for a very uninformative comment. I believe most people see a future where civilization progresses. There is just somewhat of a consensus, among left leaning people and groups of scientists, that we need to dial back energy usage short term, until the sources of that energy are moved away from fossil fuels.
I don't think a willingness to accept less energy for a decade or two, constitutes an anti-civilization agenda. I don't even think the small fraction of extremists who want everyone living on an organic commune are anti-civilization.
"anti-civilization agenda": well, no, but I see what you mean (I think). Most ecologists do promote another civilization, since they believe - rightly or not - that our current civilization will lead to an environmental collapse.
Deep ecologists have decided once and for all that technology and science won't provide the solution, hence what you call their " anti-civilization agenda".
Let's take a step back and look at things calmly. You want not to be restrained in your way of life. But a better efficiency enable to do the same with less energy. So you'd be not restrained in any way. Therefore there is no reason to want to use "more energy" as a goal by itself.
Better efficiency implies batter technologies and better Science. This is where too many ecologists get it wrong.
However, we can also say that technologies don't mechanically provide a better world.
Biotechnology has resulted in a massive use of pesticides that kills biodiversity while the agro-tech business make people fat through over-processed food and ingredients bad for health.
Technology also enable us to do industrial wonders but they also pollute (rare metal extraction for example).
Eating food bad for your health and living within high level of pollution don't look to me as great civilizational achievements, do they?
Last point: we need "clean energy", not "cleaner". Science has demonstrated how fast climate changes and biodiversity plummets. In the short term, the cleaner, the better - but that can last only during a rather short transition time to really clean energy.
Many countries have at last got out of endemic poverty. Many African countries before the Covid were growing their GDP by 3 to 5% per year. It's great but that means their use of energy is rising fast.
So to stop the climate change, we really need to transition much faster. Many ecologists don't see that transition even starting ; neither do they see science and technology provide the solution on the coming years. Hence their agenda of rationing.
I can't see that agenda being politically feasible. I personally conclude that we will hit a wall collectively. When climate will be so bad and the collapse of biodiversity will directly hit our way or life, then we will take the hard decisions.
I don't believe in a civilization collapse. Books by true historians have debunked every claim of a civilization collapse due to overuse of the natural resources. And even so, we are super resilient animals, super efficient as organizing and adapting when necessary.
But, as you rightly pointed out, we are not equal in this world. The huge costs when hitting the wall will not be fairly splitted. The wealthier you are in a wealthier country you are, the less you are likely to suffer from it.
Since you don't want any change in your way of life, you should aim to belong to the 1%. Because 99% of us will have to change.
And even so, being part of the 1% doesn't protect you totally, far from it. Driving a Bugatti won't matter much if a tree fall onto you because of a big storm. And you won't escape a pandemic either.
Some people prefer to be super rich and live in fear all the time of being attacked. I prefer a system where every job provides a decent way of life so streets are safe.
That is the same for climate. Some will prefer living in huge mansions with underground self-sufficient bunkers. I prefer that everyone gets to live in a super energy efficient place so that we don't need bunkers against tornadoes. Because when the tornado arrives, you'll making an errand 30 miles away and your children will be 10 miles from that bunker as well.
The solution is collective. Hence my pessimism: we will change our way of life only when it will have become unbearable. Nature will be deep into the already current 6th extinction, meaning that it will restart despite us. But that takes thousands of years. So we will have to change our way of life starting from a low point rather than starting now.
So the ecologists' agenda is not irrational. That may hurt your wanting to keep your way of life. Maybe you will be able to. But your children and your grandchildren will have quite different conditions.
Except if Science and technology provides a way out. Many bet on it. That's not irrational either but the time is the issue. We need to capture huge amounts of CO2 and methane in the next 20 years to maintain our way of life. Is this a reasonable bet?
Well, if we collectively invested trillions of dollars to reach that goal, I may take the bet. For now, we prefer bail-out the wealthier of us ; and some lunatics leaders around the world will force us to spend that money on the military.
> "simply" electrify all energy usage and let people maintain their current lifestyles exactly
You lost me at "simply"
[Edit] Sorry if this comes across as snarky, but c'mon, this is an existentially hard problem and there are few if any significant quick wins that are doable in the face of public inertia, obstruction from the petro-rich, technical complexity, etc. Giving the opponents an easily shot-down 'simply' isn't going to cut it.
Yeah, very important to electrify the supply side in the US as well. Pretty dirty at the moment. There are still gains to be realized just on the demand side though, like how EVs still emit less per mile than ICE cars even when the electricity comes from coal plants[0]. In that case, the efficiency comes form the improved thermal efficiency of an industrial-scale power plant versus little gasoline car engines.
Well, in my new house I'm all electric, but it's a new one, in the old one there is a 30kW heating system, it's a bit expensive to run it on electricity, just a little bit...
And that's essentially the same for the point: build new houses. It's surely positive and needed in the long run, but to do so you need many resources, wood itself is renewable at a certain level of demand, not renewable above that level. Long story short: not counting some mass-genocidal ideas, at a level even the original nazi probably never though of IMVHO the quicker changes possible is start to re-localize anything that can be re-localized, starting from a massive agricultural plan with very strong incentives to try to maximize local, even inefficient, food production to cut transportation as much as possible.
For many area of the planet that's still not possible tough, too many people in such areas respect of the nature local production capacity... Local and inefficient agriculture might run at a slow peace, for instance instead of powerful diesel tractors fields can be handled by less powerful on-rails electrical agrivoltaic tools, something unsustainable without government incentives, but ultimately probably doable with. That's can reduce general pollution to more manageable levels and still provide enough food in most cases. Pushing rails with similar criteria (only goods trains, running when there is enough energy, slow, inefficient, but enough for non-perishable goods).
Quicker than that I know only mass genocide and unpleasant things like that.
I cannot upvote this enough. We have a strict budget left for carbon emissions. It's not an exam in the future that we are currently studying for to pass. But thinking in budget terms also means talking about budgeting/rationing but I guess it needs to become really bad before we even dare to touch that...
Global warming is likely avoidable using geoengineering technology. But, for some reason, many don’t think a technological solution is morally appropriate. For instance, here is a concerted effort trying to permanently ban all scientific research on geoengineering [1].
Sure, no one wants to loft sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, but it won’t cost much [2] and we have plenty of natural experiments demonstrating safety (volcanoes). The critical thing is that it would buy time to transition. It’s not like there isn’t a massive interest in transitioning from fossil fuels. But, will we transition fast enough to prevent irreversible runaway positive feedback loops?
[1] interestingly, the rationale for banning solar geoengineering is not the potential danger of the technology, but the (claimed) inability to govern the process. https://www.solargeoeng.org/
Yes there are a lot of ways to reduced emissions. We should also do now the ones that are already available right now (like home insulation).
On the same line though decommissioning nuclear plants in Europe was always a bad move.
Italy abandoned nuclear with a referendum 1987 just after Chernobyll and again voted against nuclear in 2011.
Italy then buys nuclear energy from France and gas from Russia. This is just putting the head in sand and moving the problems out of sight.
Germany is/was about to make the same mistake.
Nuclear is a far from perfect solution available now which is beeing replaced for the hope of a much better solution much later on. We are not sure we'll get the much better solutions down the line. We should make all the green(ish) bets we can.
The #1 problem with renewable energy is that the transition to a mostly low-carbon grid is supposed to happen at an indeterminate point in the future. That future currently exists only on paper. Even Ireland and the UK - two countries frequently brought up in this context - still supply only around a third of electrical energy via renewables.
Electrifying everything sounds nice until you realise that nowhere on earth has load growth been supplied by renewable energy.
It is truly a crying shame that nuclear has been abandoned in pursuit of unclear future benefits all the while accelerating the climate emergency.
When Italians voted against nuclear in the 1987 referendum there were 2 active nuclear plants in Italy. We switched them off and de-commission them.
Switched off reactors and consumed nuclear piles are still a radiation hazard and don't produce anymore energy.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Even if isn't available now, you can start building now. This isn't the gotcha many think it is.
A nuclear plant will provide decades of energy without emitting carbon into the atmosphere. In all that time, build towards a future where the nuclear plant isn't needed. The promise of a wind and solar future is still several decades in the future. Why wait for that when we have a problem right now?
> Of the hundreds of strategy plans I’ve analysed over the five years I’ve been studying energy, almost every single one ensures three things. First, that global citizens will still buy a lot of energy. Second, that control of energy resources will remain concentrated among a few industry players. Third, that energy-intensive companies and their shareholders will still make huge profits.
And there it is: the big boys are addicted to oil profits and "the spice must flow". Last time I looked (a few years ago) the ten most profitable companies in the world were nine oil companies and Apple.
(As I type this there's a guy outside driving a gas-powered noisy golf-cart thing with a tank and a gas-powered pump spraying plant poison on the lawn. It's a microcosm of what's wrong with us. Poisoning the air, land, and water, polluting sound itself, to maintain a wasteland of useless grass! What's more, you could make a lawn that maintained itself and fed some livestock, and not waste this guy on this stupid destructive job.)
There's also a great case to be made for integrated alcohol fuel production on a local ecologically harmonious scale to power ICE vehicles (or hybrids) In many cases it makes way more sense that going directly for full electrification of cars, trucks, and busses, etc. (I know of http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/277 but there are others.)
As pointed out in TFA we have all the solutions and technology we really need already. What seems to be missing is the knowledge and will to employ them.
One avenue which doesn't require a lot of people/companies to participate, is carbon capture. Not only can it reduce the net emission, but it can even reverse the trend. One example is SpaceX which has plans to produce some of its methane fuel for starship by carbon capture using solar.
I think there is a contradiction: on one hand, consumption should be reduced for sustainable production. But I have not heard anything on reducing the work time. I do not think that there can be a consensus that asks to work more for less.
It is not possible for some type of workers, who already work 12 h/day and have no savings.
Something should change in what work is, how production is organized and profit is produced or I do not see how else this contradiction can be resolved.
The work can be organized by reducing work time (workday) to produce all there is necessary for biological living. Say 4 h workday (see productivity growth on why this is possible), no wage cut, at production factors, construction, food, etc. This 4 hour workday will be enough for some good level of living. And everything else can be produced somehow else, not as work. Then it will not be necessary to keep production of some object only for the sake of paying for a house, thus consumption will slightly lower but work day will lower, too.
For a very long time now the basic premise has been to go to the largest connected market that exist and buy from whoever sell energy at the cheapest price. When nations want to encourage more renewables they add subsidies in hope that this will enable some companies to deliver a product onto the market that has a lower sticker price. In some cases they offer to pay the subsidies as a bonus on top of the market price, thus enabling companies to lower the sticker price below that of competitors.
This system works great if you want to optimize for price. Even if a nation want to sell cheap in order to fund an invasion force, the buyer can continue as before and just buy based on the price. Similar for carbon emissions, as the buyer doesn't feel responsible for the subsidies. If there is an offer on the connected market then the buyer can buy it.
Readit News
Griffith is also careful to note that climate solutions are "yes ands", so we should increase efficiencies as much as we can in addition to electrifying as much as we can (and also pursuing ambitious strategies like fusion and CCS). Definitely make a great case of rolling out existing solutions like solar and wind in a big way to bring down carbon emissions really quickly.
[0] - the book focuses only on the US, but results could be similar in countries with similar economies.
Oh, and they also have a 9 month lead time, if you're lucky!
And this is after I've spent five figures opening every wall, heavily insulating the place, and buttoning it back up.
I'm not complaining personally; I can afford this okay, but it's impractical to expect even moderately well-off Americans to be able to. This isn't just about the bottom line of developers, 'cause most housing stock is already owned. We're probably looking at massive subsidies to make it happen, and significant resistance because doing it is a huge imposition (one I did willingly, but I knew I was getting into it) reliant on limited labor and materials.
I don't think it does. In principle, you could stay relatively inefficient with low cost to the climate as long as you were drawing power from overprovisioned wind and solar. Of course, that energy may be better spent elsewhere so efficiency is critical, but we can't get carbon emissions down to zero by only increasing efficiency of systems that ultimately draw power from coal and natural gas power plants.
"Fighting Climate Change" is all sunshine and rainbows and photovoltaics until you realise that the messaging has been thoroughly usurped by an anti-civilisation regressive agenda. They don't want people using cleaner energy; they primarily want people using less energy; they sell that goal with promotion of "eco" and "green" etc.
I want us to use more AND cleaner energy; one without the other is a civilisation-level failure.
I don't think a willingness to accept less energy for a decade or two, constitutes an anti-civilization agenda. I don't even think the small fraction of extremists who want everyone living on an organic commune are anti-civilization.
Deep ecologists have decided once and for all that technology and science won't provide the solution, hence what you call their " anti-civilization agenda".
Let's take a step back and look at things calmly. You want not to be restrained in your way of life. But a better efficiency enable to do the same with less energy. So you'd be not restrained in any way. Therefore there is no reason to want to use "more energy" as a goal by itself.
Better efficiency implies batter technologies and better Science. This is where too many ecologists get it wrong.
However, we can also say that technologies don't mechanically provide a better world.
Biotechnology has resulted in a massive use of pesticides that kills biodiversity while the agro-tech business make people fat through over-processed food and ingredients bad for health.
Technology also enable us to do industrial wonders but they also pollute (rare metal extraction for example).
Eating food bad for your health and living within high level of pollution don't look to me as great civilizational achievements, do they?
Last point: we need "clean energy", not "cleaner". Science has demonstrated how fast climate changes and biodiversity plummets. In the short term, the cleaner, the better - but that can last only during a rather short transition time to really clean energy.
Many countries have at last got out of endemic poverty. Many African countries before the Covid were growing their GDP by 3 to 5% per year. It's great but that means their use of energy is rising fast.
So to stop the climate change, we really need to transition much faster. Many ecologists don't see that transition even starting ; neither do they see science and technology provide the solution on the coming years. Hence their agenda of rationing.
I can't see that agenda being politically feasible. I personally conclude that we will hit a wall collectively. When climate will be so bad and the collapse of biodiversity will directly hit our way or life, then we will take the hard decisions.
I don't believe in a civilization collapse. Books by true historians have debunked every claim of a civilization collapse due to overuse of the natural resources. And even so, we are super resilient animals, super efficient as organizing and adapting when necessary.
But, as you rightly pointed out, we are not equal in this world. The huge costs when hitting the wall will not be fairly splitted. The wealthier you are in a wealthier country you are, the less you are likely to suffer from it.
Since you don't want any change in your way of life, you should aim to belong to the 1%. Because 99% of us will have to change.
And even so, being part of the 1% doesn't protect you totally, far from it. Driving a Bugatti won't matter much if a tree fall onto you because of a big storm. And you won't escape a pandemic either.
Some people prefer to be super rich and live in fear all the time of being attacked. I prefer a system where every job provides a decent way of life so streets are safe.
That is the same for climate. Some will prefer living in huge mansions with underground self-sufficient bunkers. I prefer that everyone gets to live in a super energy efficient place so that we don't need bunkers against tornadoes. Because when the tornado arrives, you'll making an errand 30 miles away and your children will be 10 miles from that bunker as well.
The solution is collective. Hence my pessimism: we will change our way of life only when it will have become unbearable. Nature will be deep into the already current 6th extinction, meaning that it will restart despite us. But that takes thousands of years. So we will have to change our way of life starting from a low point rather than starting now.
So the ecologists' agenda is not irrational. That may hurt your wanting to keep your way of life. Maybe you will be able to. But your children and your grandchildren will have quite different conditions.
Except if Science and technology provides a way out. Many bet on it. That's not irrational either but the time is the issue. We need to capture huge amounts of CO2 and methane in the next 20 years to maintain our way of life. Is this a reasonable bet?
Well, if we collectively invested trillions of dollars to reach that goal, I may take the bet. For now, we prefer bail-out the wealthier of us ; and some lunatics leaders around the world will force us to spend that money on the military.
"Good night and good luck".
You lost me at "simply"
[Edit] Sorry if this comes across as snarky, but c'mon, this is an existentially hard problem and there are few if any significant quick wins that are doable in the face of public inertia, obstruction from the petro-rich, technical complexity, etc. Giving the opponents an easily shot-down 'simply' isn't going to cut it.
[0] - would have liked a better source but https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/electric-...
It looks like current geo-politics will undo years of disinvestment in the fossil fuel production while never having met the emission cut-off goals.
And that's essentially the same for the point: build new houses. It's surely positive and needed in the long run, but to do so you need many resources, wood itself is renewable at a certain level of demand, not renewable above that level. Long story short: not counting some mass-genocidal ideas, at a level even the original nazi probably never though of IMVHO the quicker changes possible is start to re-localize anything that can be re-localized, starting from a massive agricultural plan with very strong incentives to try to maximize local, even inefficient, food production to cut transportation as much as possible.
For many area of the planet that's still not possible tough, too many people in such areas respect of the nature local production capacity... Local and inefficient agriculture might run at a slow peace, for instance instead of powerful diesel tractors fields can be handled by less powerful on-rails electrical agrivoltaic tools, something unsustainable without government incentives, but ultimately probably doable with. That's can reduce general pollution to more manageable levels and still provide enough food in most cases. Pushing rails with similar criteria (only goods trains, running when there is enough energy, slow, inefficient, but enough for non-perishable goods).
Quicker than that I know only mass genocide and unpleasant things like that.
- Positive feedback loops of melting ice -> lower albedo -> more energy absorbed from the sun -> more ice melts
- Unstoppable acidification of oceans and death of vasts amounts of sea life
- Disruption of thermohaline ocean currents, disrupting weather everywhere with little time for nature to adapt, leading to mass extinctions
- Areas where we currently grow most food will quickly become impossible to farm
Basically the point is that the "budget" is how much we can pump and still go back and fix.
Sure, no one wants to loft sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, but it won’t cost much [2] and we have plenty of natural experiments demonstrating safety (volcanoes). The critical thing is that it would buy time to transition. It’s not like there isn’t a massive interest in transitioning from fossil fuels. But, will we transition fast enough to prevent irreversible runaway positive feedback loops?
[1] interestingly, the rationale for banning solar geoengineering is not the potential danger of the technology, but the (claimed) inability to govern the process. https://www.solargeoeng.org/
Alternatively, here is a view from the Editor of Science, calling for “Symmetric Precaution.” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm8462
[2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d/...
On the same line though decommissioning nuclear plants in Europe was always a bad move. Italy abandoned nuclear with a referendum 1987 just after Chernobyll and again voted against nuclear in 2011. Italy then buys nuclear energy from France and gas from Russia. This is just putting the head in sand and moving the problems out of sight. Germany is/was about to make the same mistake. Nuclear is a far from perfect solution available now which is beeing replaced for the hope of a much better solution much later on. We are not sure we'll get the much better solutions down the line. We should make all the green(ish) bets we can.
The #1 problem with renewable energy is that the transition to a mostly low-carbon grid is supposed to happen at an indeterminate point in the future. That future currently exists only on paper. Even Ireland and the UK - two countries frequently brought up in this context - still supply only around a third of electrical energy via renewables.
Electrifying everything sounds nice until you realise that nowhere on earth has load growth been supplied by renewable energy.
It is truly a crying shame that nuclear has been abandoned in pursuit of unclear future benefits all the while accelerating the climate emergency.
A nuclear plant will provide decades of energy without emitting carbon into the atmosphere. In all that time, build towards a future where the nuclear plant isn't needed. The promise of a wind and solar future is still several decades in the future. Why wait for that when we have a problem right now?
And there it is: the big boys are addicted to oil profits and "the spice must flow". Last time I looked (a few years ago) the ten most profitable companies in the world were nine oil companies and Apple.
(As I type this there's a guy outside driving a gas-powered noisy golf-cart thing with a tank and a gas-powered pump spraying plant poison on the lawn. It's a microcosm of what's wrong with us. Poisoning the air, land, and water, polluting sound itself, to maintain a wasteland of useless grass! What's more, you could make a lawn that maintained itself and fed some livestock, and not waste this guy on this stupid destructive job.)
Anyhow... Here's a link to an old "brain dump" comment of mine in re: systems of agriculture. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827329
There's also a great case to be made for integrated alcohol fuel production on a local ecologically harmonious scale to power ICE vehicles (or hybrids) In many cases it makes way more sense that going directly for full electrification of cars, trucks, and busses, etc. (I know of http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/277 but there are others.)
As pointed out in TFA we have all the solutions and technology we really need already. What seems to be missing is the knowledge and will to employ them.
Deleted Comment
Something should change in what work is, how production is organized and profit is produced or I do not see how else this contradiction can be resolved.
The work can be organized by reducing work time (workday) to produce all there is necessary for biological living. Say 4 h workday (see productivity growth on why this is possible), no wage cut, at production factors, construction, food, etc. This 4 hour workday will be enough for some good level of living. And everything else can be produced somehow else, not as work. Then it will not be necessary to keep production of some object only for the sake of paying for a house, thus consumption will slightly lower but work day will lower, too.
This system works great if you want to optimize for price. Even if a nation want to sell cheap in order to fund an invasion force, the buyer can continue as before and just buy based on the price. Similar for carbon emissions, as the buyer doesn't feel responsible for the subsidies. If there is an offer on the connected market then the buyer can buy it.