Garbage comment from an uninformed SW engineer: How, in the current economic and geopolitical environment, can they project that production costs will continue to decline?
Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse. I would add at least 5 years to any timeline given because of the recalibrating global energy and materials supply chains will be undergoing over time.
We're probably short of copper. Is anyone figuring out a way to use aluminum as a substitute in many applications? We can work around several of the other critical shortages(nickel, cobalt, not-so-rare rare earths, lithium) in time, either with alternatives or increased extraction, but copper seems like a tough one.
There is a lot of wishful thinking or naivete in the political class driving these transitions. I agree that we need to move rapidly to decarbonize but there seems to be a lack of appreciation for the actual work involved in the transition. There is also a parasite-class of folks whispering deceitful tales in the ears of politicians(ahem, hydrogen, ahem) which really only cares about getting their cut.
Politicians need to understand you don't just order solar panels and batteries off Amazon. Someone needs to make them, and that someone better be a country you're not in a proxy war or a hot war with. We need to invest in practical measures not just fairy tales that leave us in the dark for a decade or more while we figure out hard lessons.
The quick answer is that we are not short of any of those materials. We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively.
Increased prices will cause more mining and recycling, eventually the price will settle at the cost of production + something for profit. The something for profit is quite small, the coast for low risk capital is ~5% a year.
There might be a 5-10 period when profits are high for miners, but eventually the profits will be competed away by new entrants. (Except if you have a mine that produces very cheaply because it is so rich or easy to operate, these people will stay high profit. The most expensive mines will just make back they're capital costs + return).
You can see this with fracking which is horribly unprofitable. Hedge funds have lost billions over building fracking wells.
Right. Reserves are really just a measure of "things people bothered to look for at the current price." High prices can and do induce more searching.
Part of the whole hullabaloo about "peak oil" is that people stopped looking for oil reserves in an environment with low oil prices. Once prices started rising you saw fracking come into play that regenerated areas previously thought dead for oil production.
For the most part you are correct. But building the mines, refining, supply chains, etc takes time. So you are perhaps missing one of the main points I was trying, maybe unsuccessfully, to make: we need to deal with the 'right now' and not just worry about how we'll be fine in 50 years.
Lithium is a perfect example. We have plenty in the ground. We don't have plenty of mines. We should be allocating Li carefully until those issues are resolved in 5-10 years.
If we only base our energy policy on how things will be in a decade we will delay the transition while inflicting maximum pain on the population(energy and food shortages, rampant inflation, lower standard of living, etc).
> We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively.
That's not reality but a dream. So far we still have to find a sustainable lithium recycling on scale, there are various startups with various solutions, who actually prove to be just like most startup: PR scam for money or childish dream of someone who sold the cat before capturing it.
It's not better in mining estimation: we have estimations of different kind but they are nothing than dream, we do not really know how much lithium is accessible on earth.
The argument that this cannot work is making the argument that NO storage technologies will be good enough, not that just Li-ion batteries won't be good enough.
There are thousands of different battery chemistries. It's an extremely strong claim that all will fail. And there are approaches beyond batteries that use only very common materials. For example, pumped thermal storage, where a reversible heat engine is used to separate heat and cold, then regenerate the work consumed by running off that temperature difference.
> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce.
Is that exclusive to green tech, or is it common to both green tech and non-green tech? If both need dirty energy, what matters is not green tech needing dirty energy, but only how much dirty energy it needs compared to non-green tech, both to produce and over its lifetime.
Its a circular argument. Any action requires energy, and the only energy you have avaliable is dirty energy, so you can accuse green tech or requiring dirty energy
> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce.
This may be true for certain products, but it's not broadly true. There's nothing intrinsic that requires solar panels, lithium ion batteries, or wind turbines to be manufactured using dirty energy.
In most cases no(remember, hydrocarbons and the hydrogen produced by them are often industrial/chemical feedstocks for Si, lubricants, adhesives and polymers used in green mfg) so you're right.
The problem is right now these things do indeed depend on dirty energy. You're basically making the same fallacious argument as politicians do now. In the long run, everything will be green. That's not the point. The point is how we get there. You can't ignore the present or the engineering involved to get to the future.
Green energy requires massive amounts of energy to produce. The more we electrify vehicles and the more green energy in the grid, the greener it becomes to produce green energy.
I agree we need more manufacturing outside of Asia/developing countries, but the solution is definitely not to maintain the status quo of dirty energy just because we can’t make green energy under 100% ideal circumstances
I'd argue there are multiple concurrent paths to decarbonization, and the combination of continuing research plus market dynamics could lead us to different energy mix than this study attempts to estimate. Besides, I think the world is waking up to the importance of domestic supply chains.
The U.S. blends a lot of ethanol into gasoline, but where does that feedstock go as the ongoing EV transition cuts away traditional consumption? Lot of energy potential there that can be used to synthesize carbon neutral fuels including kerosene, natural gas, and gasoline. Corn->carbon neutral natural gas seems like a reasonably agreeable process with the distribution network and consumers already in place.
Meanwhile, solar thermal / concentrated solar is out of the limelight while research continues. Lots of interesting options when you can generate supercritical steam and provide battery-less storage, especially from materials that are essentially domestically sourced. State of that research: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/generation-3-concentrating...
Baseload from natural gas derived from feedstock + PV + solar thermal with 12h storage + wind + massive transmission investment + corn->gasoline. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat.
There are quite a lot of analysts claiming we will be short on copper once the green revolution gets under way(remember, you're talking billions of new EVs, generators, increases in electrical distribution, etc). Think about it this way: all the energy currently delivered by fossil fuels(more or less, due to some efficiency gains) will need to be delivered by the electrical network. We're also busy giving improved living standards to the half of the earth that still lives in less-than-modern conditions. We're going to need to use more aluminum(4th most common element in the crust?) or we're going to run out of copper.
This is the approach that all the other forecasters have fallen into and that this article is trying to address.
Just as many people thought the irrepressible growth of Internet data, processing power and memory would slow or cease, so is the case that continued investment into renewable power will continue to reduce costs.
We don’t have to be the ones that say what technology or materials will be used, just to say that that industry, like ours, has it covered.
> It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse.
You mean countries applying tariffs to things? Or are you talking about the Russian aggression? Or is it about that speculation that reduced spending on the US navy will make other countries helpless against naval crime?
Because the first two seem to have had no effect at all on solar panels production, and the third is a huge attention seeking non-sequitur.
The stronger statement is true: as green energy becomes increasingly cheaper than dirty, industries will transition to clean wherever they can. New industry will start out using cheaper green, and green generation capacity is almost all new.
Saying things like "Eventually" and "In 10 to 20 years" bypasses the important question of how to manage the transition while minimizing suffering, whether via starvation, economic disruptions, or continued negative climate effects.
Personally, I'm not doubting that we will achieve a decarbonized and sustainable energy infrastructure. But that's not the point. The point is how will we get there, and are we being realistic about the challenges and requirements to effectively make the transition? Are we being realistic about the energy and materials needed to build our sustainable power generation and delivery network?
It's perhaps naive and over-simplistic, but the s-curve is so well-established you can probably fit the production cost curve over time to the s-curve and get a useful prediction.
There's lots of hard work that goes into making it happen, of course.
Supply Chains are primarily fossil based and can NOT be substituted with low density sources like Green Energy or even electricity at all.
For example, you can't efficiently make steel or most other metals with electricity alone. Even primarily electrically refined metals like copper or aluminum REQUIRE inputs that can not be made or refined or extracted with electricity. Often this is about chemical reductions that required carbon or other reductants that can't be effectively or efficiently made with electricity. The most obvious one is silicon - carbon reduction of SiO2 is the only and best efficient refining method (1st stage only - you need further far more energy intensive refining to make semiconductor-grade silicon).
Recently brought up in Congress was questions of how petrochemicals are to be produced if the Green goal of eliminating oil is accomplished. Stuff like plastics. All sorts of things depend upon plastics and plastics require petrochemicals. The most obvious one is plastic sterilization aids and sterile materials like syringes, packaging for needles, etc. ALL 20th century medicine is largely destroyed without petrochemicals. Also all pharmaceuticals deeply depend upon petrochemicals.
The respondent had no answer and she simply tried to resort to high-intensity angry BS. Clearly she'd never thought ANY of this through and didn't care because she was living off the anger of hating oil but knew nothing about how oil is used or how dependent all supply chains are on oil.
You are underestimating the good faith of the political class. In fact, they are borderline psychopathic with high levels Dunning-Kruger delusion about the correctness of their decisions/beliefs.
The additional issue: PVs have finite lifespan. Lithium batteries have extremely finite lifespans. So you have to replace them and have ALL the supply chains to do that forever. Which are fossil fuel dependent at fundamental chemical/physical levels. So most of those supply chains can NEVER be made green.
Green Energy is primarily a Cargo-Cult Religion not based on facts. That is a major problem because if you shutdown fossil fuels, we will end up with nothing - we will not even manage to have the levels of civilization and technology seen in the last 300-500 years. Basically a dark age.
You’re seemingly unaware that petrochemicals can be synthesized with energy and simple organic feedstocks. The chemistry is pretty well established to bootstrap up from water and CO2 to complex hydrocarbons and from there of course the same petrochemical processes can be applied. Green energy is perfectly capable of this.
Oil and petrochemicals have many uses and they will be with us for decades but at some point this century we will get the vast majority of our energy needs from fusion (the sun), hydro, wind and nuclear. It will likely take longer than we think and but might as well start now than keep running a dangerous experiment on the planet
And your car doesn't? What kind of argument is this?
My panels have 25 year warranty, whats the warranty on a diesel generator?
> questions of how petrochemicals are to be produced if the Green goal of eliminating oil is accomplished.
Petromechicals have no relevance to Climate change and CO2 emissions. You can keep using single-use bags and straws and throwing them into landfill untill you use up all the oil on earth.
They have relevance to our health, i.e. microplastics, but thats a separate problem.
The cargo-cult religion is unfortunately back by science and years of study and agreement amongst scientists - human activity is causing climate change and global warming. You sound like you haven't accepted this fact based reality that we live in and are a part of.
Climate change is our fault, and we have to stop it, there is no other alternative that also includes life continuing on earth as we know it. This change is already happening, it's not hypothetical. Global systems are already being affected, extreme weather and drought more common. Global temperature change has to be kept as low as possible, or we risk crop failure, famine and mass immigration at a scale that has never been seen.
I understand there are huge logistical issues with shifting off fossil fuels, but we as humans have to. We can get to the moon, we can stop burning old dinosaurs & plants to make stuff work. Even without climate change, these resources are finite. Are you just going to accept waiting for all the oil to run out before making plastic tubes from something else? The clue is in the name fossil, they take millions of years to produce and are non-renewable.
You can think of me as a green psychopath all you like, but it doesn't change the cold hard facts. I hope my reply isn't high-intensity BS.
That's the real enormous issue. Beyond the Green New Deal, witch is green in the sense of dollars main color for very few, chemical/radioactive stereotypical waste leaking from abandoned rusty barrels green while being sold as grass green, we have a real issue: oil is consumed FAR faster than natural regeneration and that since many decades so far, witch means that a day perhaps not that far away it will be more and more scarce and finally unavailable. NOT ONLY for fuel, but also for plastic witch happen to be needed for electrical insulation, hydraulic and air insulation, anti-vibration stuff etc etc etc and we do not know how to replace it on scale.
So far no other feasible on scale energy solution exists. Nuclear fission and mountain pumped hydro are the most stable and powerful solution we have, but can't work on scale alone and nothing else is there.
Without energy no matter climate change or something else: any civilization collapse anyway.
Jesus it's nice to read an informed comment on here.
Yes, it's difficult to try to get these facts across to folks without them thinking you're a shill for big oil. It's especially sad/frustrating when people who claim to be engineers don't understand the engineering involved in the process of transitioning to green energy.
Access to power / energy is what wealth is all about today, and has been for over 100 years.
However rapidly a "green energy transition" could possibly happen, if it means reducing access to power / energy, then it means a drop in standards of living. In some parts of the world that means more than merely tightening the belt -- it can mean real hunger, while in many others it might mean a return to poverty, though perhaps not hunger. Moreover, people will probably not accept a permanent (or permanent-seeming) reduction in standards of living.
I'm not sold that this would happen. It seems to me the plan in the US is to add green energy, and then slowly replace the dirty energy with more green. I admit I am ignorant of the plans of other nations, but from where I am sitting I don't see any reason to believe there will ever be a reduction in available energy.
Well, that can't be "rapid". TFA is about a "rapid" transition.
I'm saying that's just politically infeasible unless you define "rapid" as "as fast as we can without impoverishing people" or unless you define it as "damn the consequences, just do it". That's pretty obviously true. If you take the first alternative, however, you have to consider how long these touted savings will take to materialize and the opportunity cost of the investment needed to get there.
For example if you install grid-tied solar panels for your house it will take some number of years for that investment (and upkeep) to pay for itself -- if the lifetime of the installation is 30 years and it pays for itself in 10, it might be worth it, but whether it is worth it will depend not just on the 20 years' worth of savings you'll get, but also on the opportunity cost of the capital needed to fund that solar installation.
Opportunity costs are often hard to gauge, so it's easy to con people with analyses that fail to take opportunity costs into account. The opportunity cost of an investment that will yield "trillions" in savings must be substantial because the investment itself must be substantial (if it was free, we'd have done it already, so it must be substantial!).
Energy is just one factor, that played a huge role because we come from a world where lack of energy was limiting a lot of things.
The easiest counterpoint is energy efficiency. Often it reduces energy use while even increasing wealth.
The real issues of transition lie in processes that are relatively efficient with fossil fuels and relatively inefficient with electricity (H2 and NH3 production, hydrocarbon production, airplane fuel production)
One thing I've not seen a decent discussion of is what industries benefit from enormous amounts of almost free electricity? Other than the manufacturers of wind, solar, etc systems, how does this effect the economy?
Obviously that effect is going to be significant, but what exactly does it look like?
Desalination might be the best use for excess generating capacity, after the local storage is all charged up.
(Desalination costs >140x less energy than extraction by current dehumidification methods, although a recent advance in the latter may vut this to just 60x.)
Then, pump the desalinated water up to high-altitude reservoirs.
In some places (e.g. Northern California) that could be as simple as vaporizing the water and letting the wind carry it to the mountains, to be rained into reservoirs.
Desalination might then amount to pumping seawater through greenhouses and exhausting the humid air, much more cheaply than forcing it through membranes. There is no need to get every last water molecule out, as there is a plenty of seawater. The only cost is pumping. Outgoing effluent may be used both to pre-warm incoming water, and assist pumping via directly coupled turbines.
Less-concentrated, cooler effluent is better for ecosystems it drains into. It could also be be made to capture and carry away atmospheric CO2, on its way out, with enough lime added to maintain pH. Cement makers might operate these systems to avoid carbon taxes.
Aluminum production is a bit problematic, since aluminum pots cannot be turned off too long without failing (either freezing up or overheating the walls).
it looks like most cities in the world -- excessive, 24-hour, advertising and safety with electricity.. the external costs of everything fossil-fuel are not at all inline with the reality of what is happening with Climate now
I think it will be important as we transition to EVs to have more energy available.
In Ontario, the typical family home uses something like 750 kWh/month on average. If you estimate 5km/kWh (roughly right?), and presume a car is driving something like 1000 km/month, that's an extra 200 kWh/month needed, about a 25% increase.
But in the less developed parts of the world, a car might just be a much larger component of personal energy use- perhaps most of it.
Only for solar/wind/pumped storage/biomass though.
Not for nuclear power:
>We constructed an additional scenario in which nuclear plays a dominant role in replacing fossil fuels, but this is much more expensive than the other scenarios. For example, using a 1.4% discount rate, the expected NPC is about $25 trillion more than for the No Transition scenario.
Recently I saw on HN that Australia has a path to >98% renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro) with only 5 hours of battery storage. That’s a lot of value for less battery backup than I would have thought.
Do you believe it? Solar+wind has had several notable failures so far when overcast skies combined with windless conditions. Hydro probably helps to a great degree though.
the cynic in me says that those savings will just become profits for the companies and government through taxes and greed....so savings are relative. Also it seems to be highly dependent on solar mass adoption
You know, collectively, we can do something about that… It’s a political decision in society to allow that added value to be sucked up by those who are already wealthy.
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Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse. I would add at least 5 years to any timeline given because of the recalibrating global energy and materials supply chains will be undergoing over time.
We're probably short of copper. Is anyone figuring out a way to use aluminum as a substitute in many applications? We can work around several of the other critical shortages(nickel, cobalt, not-so-rare rare earths, lithium) in time, either with alternatives or increased extraction, but copper seems like a tough one.
There is a lot of wishful thinking or naivete in the political class driving these transitions. I agree that we need to move rapidly to decarbonize but there seems to be a lack of appreciation for the actual work involved in the transition. There is also a parasite-class of folks whispering deceitful tales in the ears of politicians(ahem, hydrogen, ahem) which really only cares about getting their cut.
Politicians need to understand you don't just order solar panels and batteries off Amazon. Someone needs to make them, and that someone better be a country you're not in a proxy war or a hot war with. We need to invest in practical measures not just fairy tales that leave us in the dark for a decade or more while we figure out hard lessons.
Increased prices will cause more mining and recycling, eventually the price will settle at the cost of production + something for profit. The something for profit is quite small, the coast for low risk capital is ~5% a year.
There might be a 5-10 period when profits are high for miners, but eventually the profits will be competed away by new entrants. (Except if you have a mine that produces very cheaply because it is so rich or easy to operate, these people will stay high profit. The most expensive mines will just make back they're capital costs + return).
You can see this with fracking which is horribly unprofitable. Hedge funds have lost billions over building fracking wells.
Part of the whole hullabaloo about "peak oil" is that people stopped looking for oil reserves in an environment with low oil prices. Once prices started rising you saw fracking come into play that regenerated areas previously thought dead for oil production.
For the most part you are correct. But building the mines, refining, supply chains, etc takes time. So you are perhaps missing one of the main points I was trying, maybe unsuccessfully, to make: we need to deal with the 'right now' and not just worry about how we'll be fine in 50 years.
Lithium is a perfect example. We have plenty in the ground. We don't have plenty of mines. We should be allocating Li carefully until those issues are resolved in 5-10 years.
If we only base our energy policy on how things will be in a decade we will delay the transition while inflicting maximum pain on the population(energy and food shortages, rampant inflation, lower standard of living, etc).
That's not reality but a dream. So far we still have to find a sustainable lithium recycling on scale, there are various startups with various solutions, who actually prove to be just like most startup: PR scam for money or childish dream of someone who sold the cat before capturing it.
It's not better in mining estimation: we have estimations of different kind but they are nothing than dream, we do not really know how much lithium is accessible on earth.
There are thousands of different battery chemistries. It's an extremely strong claim that all will fail. And there are approaches beyond batteries that use only very common materials. For example, pumped thermal storage, where a reversible heat engine is used to separate heat and cold, then regenerate the work consumed by running off that temperature difference.
Is that exclusive to green tech, or is it common to both green tech and non-green tech? If both need dirty energy, what matters is not green tech needing dirty energy, but only how much dirty energy it needs compared to non-green tech, both to produce and over its lifetime.
This may be true for certain products, but it's not broadly true. There's nothing intrinsic that requires solar panels, lithium ion batteries, or wind turbines to be manufactured using dirty energy.
The problem is right now these things do indeed depend on dirty energy. You're basically making the same fallacious argument as politicians do now. In the long run, everything will be green. That's not the point. The point is how we get there. You can't ignore the present or the engineering involved to get to the future.
I agree we need more manufacturing outside of Asia/developing countries, but the solution is definitely not to maintain the status quo of dirty energy just because we can’t make green energy under 100% ideal circumstances
The energy payback time for photovoltaics is 1.2 years in north and less than 1 year in the south with such systems typically lasting longer than 20 years. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
That is in line with energy return on investment of fossil fuels.
The U.S. blends a lot of ethanol into gasoline, but where does that feedstock go as the ongoing EV transition cuts away traditional consumption? Lot of energy potential there that can be used to synthesize carbon neutral fuels including kerosene, natural gas, and gasoline. Corn->carbon neutral natural gas seems like a reasonably agreeable process with the distribution network and consumers already in place.
Meanwhile, solar thermal / concentrated solar is out of the limelight while research continues. Lots of interesting options when you can generate supercritical steam and provide battery-less storage, especially from materials that are essentially domestically sourced. State of that research: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/generation-3-concentrating...
Baseload from natural gas derived from feedstock + PV + solar thermal with 12h storage + wind + massive transmission investment + corn->gasoline. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat.
While copper water pipes still have a market, I don't think we can claim to be short of copper.
There are quite a lot of analysts claiming we will be short on copper once the green revolution gets under way(remember, you're talking billions of new EVs, generators, increases in electrical distribution, etc). Think about it this way: all the energy currently delivered by fossil fuels(more or less, due to some efficiency gains) will need to be delivered by the electrical network. We're also busy giving improved living standards to the half of the earth that still lives in less-than-modern conditions. We're going to need to use more aluminum(4th most common element in the crust?) or we're going to run out of copper.
You mean countries applying tariffs to things? Or are you talking about the Russian aggression? Or is it about that speculation that reduced spending on the US navy will make other countries helpless against naval crime?
Because the first two seem to have had no effect at all on solar panels production, and the third is a huge attention seeking non-sequitur.
In theory, bootstrapping will eventually be complete.
Personally, I'm not doubting that we will achieve a decarbonized and sustainable energy infrastructure. But that's not the point. The point is how will we get there, and are we being realistic about the challenges and requirements to effectively make the transition? Are we being realistic about the energy and materials needed to build our sustainable power generation and delivery network?
There's lots of hard work that goes into making it happen, of course.
So, how exactly to you intent to fit the renewables (that are pre-inflection) production curves into it?
Supply Chains are primarily fossil based and can NOT be substituted with low density sources like Green Energy or even electricity at all.
For example, you can't efficiently make steel or most other metals with electricity alone. Even primarily electrically refined metals like copper or aluminum REQUIRE inputs that can not be made or refined or extracted with electricity. Often this is about chemical reductions that required carbon or other reductants that can't be effectively or efficiently made with electricity. The most obvious one is silicon - carbon reduction of SiO2 is the only and best efficient refining method (1st stage only - you need further far more energy intensive refining to make semiconductor-grade silicon).
Recently brought up in Congress was questions of how petrochemicals are to be produced if the Green goal of eliminating oil is accomplished. Stuff like plastics. All sorts of things depend upon plastics and plastics require petrochemicals. The most obvious one is plastic sterilization aids and sterile materials like syringes, packaging for needles, etc. ALL 20th century medicine is largely destroyed without petrochemicals. Also all pharmaceuticals deeply depend upon petrochemicals.
The respondent had no answer and she simply tried to resort to high-intensity angry BS. Clearly she'd never thought ANY of this through and didn't care because she was living off the anger of hating oil but knew nothing about how oil is used or how dependent all supply chains are on oil.
You are underestimating the good faith of the political class. In fact, they are borderline psychopathic with high levels Dunning-Kruger delusion about the correctness of their decisions/beliefs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHk7S6prF6M
The additional issue: PVs have finite lifespan. Lithium batteries have extremely finite lifespans. So you have to replace them and have ALL the supply chains to do that forever. Which are fossil fuel dependent at fundamental chemical/physical levels. So most of those supply chains can NEVER be made green.
Green Energy is primarily a Cargo-Cult Religion not based on facts. That is a major problem because if you shutdown fossil fuels, we will end up with nothing - we will not even manage to have the levels of civilization and technology seen in the last 300-500 years. Basically a dark age.
Oil and petrochemicals have many uses and they will be with us for decades but at some point this century we will get the vast majority of our energy needs from fusion (the sun), hydro, wind and nuclear. It will likely take longer than we think and but might as well start now than keep running a dangerous experiment on the planet
And your car doesn't? What kind of argument is this?
My panels have 25 year warranty, whats the warranty on a diesel generator?
> questions of how petrochemicals are to be produced if the Green goal of eliminating oil is accomplished.
Petromechicals have no relevance to Climate change and CO2 emissions. You can keep using single-use bags and straws and throwing them into landfill untill you use up all the oil on earth.
They have relevance to our health, i.e. microplastics, but thats a separate problem.
Climate change is our fault, and we have to stop it, there is no other alternative that also includes life continuing on earth as we know it. This change is already happening, it's not hypothetical. Global systems are already being affected, extreme weather and drought more common. Global temperature change has to be kept as low as possible, or we risk crop failure, famine and mass immigration at a scale that has never been seen.
I understand there are huge logistical issues with shifting off fossil fuels, but we as humans have to. We can get to the moon, we can stop burning old dinosaurs & plants to make stuff work. Even without climate change, these resources are finite. Are you just going to accept waiting for all the oil to run out before making plastic tubes from something else? The clue is in the name fossil, they take millions of years to produce and are non-renewable.
You can think of me as a green psychopath all you like, but it doesn't change the cold hard facts. I hope my reply isn't high-intensity BS.
That's the real enormous issue. Beyond the Green New Deal, witch is green in the sense of dollars main color for very few, chemical/radioactive stereotypical waste leaking from abandoned rusty barrels green while being sold as grass green, we have a real issue: oil is consumed FAR faster than natural regeneration and that since many decades so far, witch means that a day perhaps not that far away it will be more and more scarce and finally unavailable. NOT ONLY for fuel, but also for plastic witch happen to be needed for electrical insulation, hydraulic and air insulation, anti-vibration stuff etc etc etc and we do not know how to replace it on scale.
So far no other feasible on scale energy solution exists. Nuclear fission and mountain pumped hydro are the most stable and powerful solution we have, but can't work on scale alone and nothing else is there.
Without energy no matter climate change or something else: any civilization collapse anyway.
Yes, it's difficult to try to get these facts across to folks without them thinking you're a shill for big oil. It's especially sad/frustrating when people who claim to be engineers don't understand the engineering involved in the process of transitioning to green energy.
However rapidly a "green energy transition" could possibly happen, if it means reducing access to power / energy, then it means a drop in standards of living. In some parts of the world that means more than merely tightening the belt -- it can mean real hunger, while in many others it might mean a return to poverty, though perhaps not hunger. Moreover, people will probably not accept a permanent (or permanent-seeming) reduction in standards of living.
I'm saying that's just politically infeasible unless you define "rapid" as "as fast as we can without impoverishing people" or unless you define it as "damn the consequences, just do it". That's pretty obviously true. If you take the first alternative, however, you have to consider how long these touted savings will take to materialize and the opportunity cost of the investment needed to get there.
For example if you install grid-tied solar panels for your house it will take some number of years for that investment (and upkeep) to pay for itself -- if the lifetime of the installation is 30 years and it pays for itself in 10, it might be worth it, but whether it is worth it will depend not just on the 20 years' worth of savings you'll get, but also on the opportunity cost of the capital needed to fund that solar installation.
Opportunity costs are often hard to gauge, so it's easy to con people with analyses that fail to take opportunity costs into account. The opportunity cost of an investment that will yield "trillions" in savings must be substantial because the investment itself must be substantial (if it was free, we'd have done it already, so it must be substantial!).
Deleted Comment
The easiest counterpoint is energy efficiency. Often it reduces energy use while even increasing wealth.
The real issues of transition lie in processes that are relatively efficient with fossil fuels and relatively inefficient with electricity (H2 and NH3 production, hydrocarbon production, airplane fuel production)
Deleted Comment
Obviously that effect is going to be significant, but what exactly does it look like?
(Desalination costs >140x less energy than extraction by current dehumidification methods, although a recent advance in the latter may vut this to just 60x.)
Then, pump the desalinated water up to high-altitude reservoirs.
In some places (e.g. Northern California) that could be as simple as vaporizing the water and letting the wind carry it to the mountains, to be rained into reservoirs.
Desalination might then amount to pumping seawater through greenhouses and exhausting the humid air, much more cheaply than forcing it through membranes. There is no need to get every last water molecule out, as there is a plenty of seawater. The only cost is pumping. Outgoing effluent may be used both to pre-warm incoming water, and assist pumping via directly coupled turbines.
Less-concentrated, cooler effluent is better for ecosystems it drains into. It could also be be made to capture and carry away atmospheric CO2, on its way out, with enough lime added to maintain pH. Cement makers might operate these systems to avoid carbon taxes.
Once grids implement a sane variable pricing system and manage transmission capacity properly electricity prices are unlikely to go zero or negative.
EVs alone will probably soak up excess demand (& contribute back when pumped storage starts running dry).
https://spectrum.ieee.org/could-storing-electricity-in-white...
https://rondo.com/
In Ontario, the typical family home uses something like 750 kWh/month on average. If you estimate 5km/kWh (roughly right?), and presume a car is driving something like 1000 km/month, that's an extra 200 kWh/month needed, about a 25% increase.
But in the less developed parts of the world, a car might just be a much larger component of personal energy use- perhaps most of it.
Thus, as long as people don't charge during the absolute peak (about 2hrs a day) there's no capacity issue at all.
Not for nuclear power:
>We constructed an additional scenario in which nuclear plays a dominant role in replacing fossil fuels, but this is much more expensive than the other scenarios. For example, using a 1.4% discount rate, the expected NPC is about $25 trillion more than for the No Transition scenario.
Early bird may get the worm, but the 2nd mouse gets the cheese.
Compared to the size of the fossil fuel extraction industry, it's tiny.
The only question is how quickly we can build up to the scale needed, not if we can.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32567994
Of course they will. You can thank this effect for the high standard of living we enjoy from the free market.
That sounds like a great deal for everyone!
I think that's what transpired from Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"