“Trillionsof dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.”
Core issue is he’s at best justifying his points with sloppy thinking, we didn’t just transition to solar for fun we got actual energy from those investments. The world also spent around 100 trillion on just oil over 20 years excluding natural gas and coal yet tomorrow we are going to still need to spend more. So, on that basis it looks like a great investment and huge progress.
Except look at where exactly that 87% number is from, it includes fuel oil to heat homes while excluding passive solar gain. So it’s a number that does represent something just not “dependence on fossil fuels.” After all the primary use of energy by humanity is either plants converting sunlight to chemical energy or even more holistically the energy needed to keep the earth from freezing. In the end he picked those numbers because saying saying humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels dropped from something like 0.00087% to 0.00084% just doesn’t have the same impact.
Retric|3 years ago
Core issue is he’s at best justifying his points with sloppy thinking, we didn’t just transition to solar for fun we got actual energy from those investments. The world also spent around 100 trillion on just oil over 20 years excluding natural gas and coal yet tomorrow we are going to still need to spend more. So, on that basis it looks like a great investment and huge progress.
Except look at where exactly that 87% number is from, it includes fuel oil to heat homes while excluding passive solar gain. So it’s a number that does represent something just not “dependence on fossil fuels.” After all the primary use of energy by humanity is either plants converting sunlight to chemical energy or even more holistically the energy needed to keep the earth from freezing. In the end he picked those numbers because saying saying humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels dropped from something like 0.00087% to 0.00084% just doesn’t have the same impact.