We could always have been moving faster, saving more money and more lives, but we really didn't have good science on the last few percent of carbon emissions from the power system.
The deniers updated their messaging too, so you regularly see (and see in these comments today) people saying "Yeah, renewable energy is cheaper and cleaner but ... desperately makes up something to justify their believing lots of obvious lies ... in 2050 when we have lots of cheap, clean renewable energy something vague and bad will happen so we should just slow down and burn more fossil fuels for reasons.
So it's good to recognize that we now have better answers for the delaying tactic questions.
I'd say NIMBYism is also a big contributor. Renewable energy farms are rarely located near population centers and convincing rural people to sell their land to generate/transport energy to urban centers is a multiyear process with single holdouts stalling projects. The alternative of invoking eminent domain is also politically unattractive.
> At press time, representatives from the world’s leading economies had signaled that they would continue to heavily rely on fossil fuels until they had something more than an overwhelming scientific consensus to go on.
I somewhat think the obvious political decision is to embrace a bit of corruption for the greater good, and just offer the fossil fuel companies the opportunity to transition to green energy and own the next great monopoly. Or just pick new winners.
frankly dealing with a monopoly and a bit of corruption is better than dealing with the effects of climate change.
I'd modify that to 'greedy states and corporations' as the state-run socialist-style nations with excess fossil fuel reserves (Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Russia, etc.) are just as bent on exporting their fossil fuels as those that adhere to Wall Street corporate capitalism models (the USA, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, UAE, etc.).
In both cases, the problem is explainable - here's a person sitting on an oil well that brings them US$10 million per year (or equivalent), resulting in a lifestyle of relative luxury and abundance, and you say to them, shut down that oil well, use your saved resources to put up solar and wind turbines and batteries to meet your regional energy needs, and reduce your yearly income by 90% as a result, because no more exports!
Short-sighted greed is certainly a universal phenomenon, we can conclude.
It blows my mind that the very same people who can't seem to talk about anything but growing the economy don't see the incredible opportunity to grow the economy that building tons of new green tech represents. Like, completely replacing the world's energy infrastructure is more jobs (and money) than all the defense projects and military tech we could ever think up, combined.
It's almost like it was never about the economy, but just about keeping the existing set of corporations raking in the profits and protecting them from disruption.
Yes, historically, all major economic booms coincide with some dramatic evolution in the use of energy. If you stop thinking about renewables as some hippy pipe dream and start thinking about them as a roughly two orders of magnitude drop in cost for energy, it's immediately obvious that this is going to kick off another such boom and that it will happen a lot faster than some people expect precisely because of that drop in price.
Initially, not a lot of people believed this and it was kind of expensive to e.g. put solar on your roof and even make the argument that it was at all economical to do so. That changed a few years ago and people around the world are doing the math and coming to the conclusion that these systems pay for themselves in well under half their supposed life time. Ever since that became obvious, there is a lot of demand for solar panels. Companies building more or better panels are popping up everywhere. There's a lot of innovation happening. And the net result is better, cheaper, technology produced at a rapidly expanding scale. We have already hit the point that even the subsidies and incentives that are available for this are not technically needed any more.
IMHO, learning effects, and ongoing research will cause cost to drop much further still. We have nowhere near reached the point of what is technically feasible here at all. What happens when you drop the cost of energy by about 100x in a few decades or so? An economic boom is what happens. Things that used to be prohibitively expensive now become cheap to do. And people start doing these things as quickly as they can.
You might think 100x is an exaggeration. But actually, we've already experienced that with solar in the past 20 years. Price parity was reached more than 5 years ago. I'm actually talking about another 100x improvement So four orders of magnitude in total. About 2 orders relative to fossil fuel powered energy, which is a fair benchmark because that's what we are trying to get rid off. At some point renewables are going to be so obviously cheaper that they start pushing out anything more expensive out of the market. The cheaper things get, the faster that happens. The more it happens, the faster learning effects, R&D, etc. will happen. That massive acceleration is basically what is causing people to move targets.
My comment isn't related specifically to going green, but replacing infrastructure that works perfectly well just for jobs is basically the broken window fallacy in economics.
Repaving the highway every six months would "create" lots of jobs too.
Really glad to see this discussion! My former advisor, Mark Jacobson, is one of the authors of the paper cited in the article. His book "100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything" [1] is a good starting point for folks with a more technical background. I recently started working on my own version [2] for young people and beginners that uses code as a medium to explore these ideas.
Perhaps more directly relevant for the HN crowd, Tom Greenwood's book "Sustainable Web Design" [3] provides simple strategies for reducing the climate impacts of the software systems we build.
Hi, are there Jacobson papers for 100% renewables looking at geographical distribution of generation, storage and interconnectors, then modelling them against weather and demand, or are they cruder than that? If those papers exist, can you recommend an accessible way to understand these models, and their outcomes? For instance, are there areas for wind generation which are more valuable that others, to provide a balance to regional lulls, and is that data published?
Is model code available so that it can be run by any of us?
I read these titles and always facepalm and laugh.
If you remove researchers who have differing opinions *of course* you’ll get the claims you want. Particularly, when those researchers are funded in a way that incentivizes particular claims.
Now to these easily debunked claims, look at energy production vs capacity vs consumption in Germany:
Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables.
This is every country. Because renewable energy comes in bursts. This also doesn’t include the fact it costs a ton of fossil fuel energy to produce a lot of these renewable systems (solar, wind turbines, batteries).
I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space. You’d also have to force countries like China and Russia with force… so good luck.
You are wrong in several points.
First of all, if we switch from burning fossil fuels to electricity for providing most uses of energy, energy consumption falls by 2/3rds. Heat pumps are easily more than 4x as effective per unit of energy used than burning fossil fuels. Similar numbers for electric cars and many other usages. So we are litterally looking at a moving goal post :)
Renewable energy also doesn't come in "bursts". Yes, the maximum available production varies over time, for that we need to compensate. By storage, by grids, by having more flexible loads (for many decades providers worked hard to make loads non-flexible to make their jobs easier, now it is the other way around). And of course, some amount of power2gas will provide us with perfectly renewable gas which can be easily stored for whenever it is needed - we only want to limit that because it uses more power than using the electricity directly.
And no, to get there we are not "destroying quality of life". There is no idication it would even compared to our current quality of life. Quite the contrary, as cheap, clean energy will improve quality of life.
You are also missing, that our quality of life isn't given. It currently is constantly reduced by the effects of climate change we are already experiencing. Europe is going through a catastrophic hot and dry summer. With ironically energy shortages as the water cooling for nuclear power plants is failing.
Just being able to maintain todays quality of life would be quite an accomplishment, which can only be achieved by cutting CO2 emissions very quickly, if at all.
> Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables.
You make a lot of unsubstantiated, untrue and misleading claims, but just to drill into this one for people who haven't seen this classic dodge before:
"Primary Energy Consumption" measures all the energy in fossil fuels. About 2/3 of that energy is lost as waste heat when generating electricity which isn't actually useful for "quality of life" but people love quoting it to make renewables seem ridiculous.
When in fact, it's one of the main reasons they're a good idea and we should Electrify Everything:
Renewable energy doesnt come in bursts: Wind across big areas (e.g. Europe), biogas, running water, geothermal power, osmotic power, etc.
I don't know where you are taking renewable energy capacity from and what are you trying to say. Same goes for producing wind turbines, which actually doesn't require fossil fuel at all.
> I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space.
> Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables. This is every country. Because renewable energy comes in bursts.
Any engineer could have told you that switching to renewables requires grid expansion and ideally energy storage with renewable overcapacity generation. The more grid expansion, the less storage you'll probably need and vice versa. Germany is just another case of politicians not listening to experts.
Has anyone seen any good explanations or visualisations of how long term storage would be achieved? For instance in Britain solar in winter has 1/10th of the output in summer, and we can have lulls in wind output for many days at a time. Using these resources to reduce gas use makes sense, but our current plans call for about 30% of electricity generated from gas using carbon capture and storage. How would this be handled under a 100% renewable scenario? Is it just generating Hydrogen?
Or it is that these intermittency gaps can be closed using long distance connectors? Has anyone done studies showing exactly where resources would need to be located and the length of connectors, modelled against weather and demand patterns?
Yes, long distance transmission for geographical diversity of wind power. This is studied a lot in the power generation industry. Without long distance transmission you need natural gas peaker plants capable of the same output as solar/wind, and solar/wind is more expensive than just building natural gas plants (but less CO2). We cant build enough batteries to use in place of peaker plants until sodium batteries are production ready and produced at large scale (this could happen by the end of the decade though).
Hydrogen for short term storage, ammonia for medium term storage. Both much less efficient than just using electricity directly, but the aim is to drive down the cost of generation so that the inefficiency doesn’t matter so much.
There are also tons of other short-medium term storage solutions, and we probably need all of them that we can get our hands on, but hydrogen and ammonia are the ones that feel most likely to operate at grid scale.
Suggests Great Britain would ideally have only 1% solar, and storing 8% of the wind production as Green Hydrogen
Doing it without Green Hydrogen, just solar wind batteries would double the cost.
Connectors help too, though they also cost money to build. As renewables and batteries have plummeted in price, connectors have become less necessary. Once you have Green Hydrogen you can ship it around and store it like LNG.
Pumped hydro and hot sand batteries should be enough if we get our act together and actually commit to something. There’s also no reason solar from Spain or Morocco couldn’t be wired in at some point. Obviously we currently have a chicken and egg situation where it’s not worth building the X times our peak need in renewables without the storage and not worth building the storage when renewables are a fraction rather than a multiple of our current supply.
> For instance in Britain solar in winter has 1/10th of the output in summer, and we can have lulls in wind output for many days at a time.
Grid expansion can average over regional lulls. Renewables also need to be built to provide significant overcapacity. Storage can help, but you can do it with only those two.
Not just Oil & Gas companies - but oil and gas nations. There's quite a few geopolitically important countries that either derive a large proportion of their GDP / foreign exchange from hydrocarbons, or rely on them so heavily there's no practical path for transition by 2050.
Compared to the difficulty in getting these nations to play a full and productive part in any transition (requiring essentially restructuring a large chunk of their economies), settling up with extractor companies will be a walk in the park.
> Many young people are depressed because they feel climate change cannot be stopped. We want to offer them hope by showing that our world can get all its energy needs from renewables at a price below that of fossil fuels
idk, to me saying that fossils can be replaced by 2050 is pretty much same as saying that climate change cannot be stopped. I think the discussion has largely moved from preventing the climate change to trying manage how bad it will be, as it seems pretty inevitable at this point.
I like Vaclav Smil’s shorthand tool for assessing these claims. Be suspicious of any predicted year for full renewable rollout that ends in a zero or a five.
This is silly: the estimates are rounded, because there's huge uncertainty. It's a very long way away from "these plants will come online on these dates". Perhaps "2045 plus or minus five years"?
We all understand how difficult software development time estimation is, right?
The tipping point has come and gone as far as the climate trajectory goes, although actions taken today will reduce the slope of the trajectory say 50 years from now. When you throw the rudder over on the Titanic too late, you must prepare for the impact. Hence this kind of messaging is rather futile:
> "Many young people are depressed because they feel climate change cannot be stopped. We want to offer them hope by showing that our world can get all its energy needs from renewables at a price below that of fossil fuels. When we first proposed this, we were ridiculed, but this paper shows our ideas are now scientific mainstream", says Auke Hoekstra from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands."
The one (going to 100% renewables) no longer implies the other (stabilizing the climate system within the lifetime of anyone alive today). Hugely expensive steps must be taken - retreat from flood plains that will be experiencing 500-year floods every 5 years, securing water supplies to survive epic droughts (with the additional loss of much of the seasonal snowpack in many regions), building termite-mound like architecture to handle the record heat waves, moving critical infrastructure back from the coastlines to deal with rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion, dealing with insects that love these new warm conditions, etc.
On top of that, replacing the existing fossil fuel infrastructure is going to cost trillions and require a complete reorganization of the global economic system - just look at all the oil tankers, pipelines, internal combustion engines, gas-and-coal fired power plants. No time to watch TikTok videos, it's going to be work, work, work. Scaling up industrial production of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries by a factor of what, 100X? Better get busy, humans.
Think of it more as an exciting challenge, adapting to these frightening new conditions - interesting times!. Of course, we'll have to raid the wealth of the fossil fuel sector and their investors to pay for all this adaptation and industrial development. Sticking the major producers with the bill makes optional sense. Implementing a ban on the global trade in fossil fuels would also be reasonable under these conditions (note that this was the first major step in eliminating the practice of chattel slavery, for comparison).
Totally agree - technologically possible. Now who’s ambition, will, and money are behind this to get those who are in the middle, don’t care, or need to look after themselves first in the ecosystem to get this done?
You make the foolish assumption that theses "researchers" are not biased simply because you agree with the premise due to your own bias.
It is rather surprising to me how people who used to rail against the "evil corporation" now love them some evil corporation simply because evil corporations have been created to pilfer society through renewable energy.
It could be a scene from 1984; yesterday the people hate corporations they always have been at war with and always will be, today they have been told to love corporations and they do so with zealous mania.
The issue isn't that we as a race can reach 100% renewable energy, it's at what cost? Right now displacing fossil fuels comes at such an enormous financial cost it's an all of humanity thing or none (or very little) of humanity thing. Also there would be such high costs for poor nations that rich nations would have to pay way more than their proportional share. Sadly it's wishful thinking to get the entire human population/their respective representatives and despots to agree to solve this problem. Our best hope is that a new technological solution with near zero marginal cost emerges and displaces fossil fuels as much as possible.
I’ve researched this extensively and I don’t agree, so there’s that.
This is a common insidious tactic of the media…pay attention to how presumptuous they are especially in headlines. I can’t even keep track of how many baseless claims they make as if they’re accepted fact anymore.
Why not offer a small list of most relevant studies then? I can claim there are hundreds of studies and that MIGHT be true or not, offer a small glimpse is not only useful to teach readers looking for sources but also to prove I've done my research not just claim to have done it.
Beside that: I doubt. Cyclically we see promise, like IBM research that cyclically say they achieve a hyper-big advances in storage, something that "in the near future" can store Zettabyte of data in a rice grain etc, and I still have to see anything even similar. I have built my new home, just six years ago, well insulated, airtight, with proper ventilation, recently upgraded from passive temperature recovery (classic VMC with a paper heat-exchanger) to a heat-pump one, with a small p.v. and lithium storage, all electric again with heat-pumps etc. well it can potentially be "autonomous" IF I'm willing to waste a very big amount of money in a very big battery, much more space for solar panels to have enough energy to recharge the bigger battery AND still depending on a grid or generator for backup because a "reasonably bigger" battery (BEVs alike size) suffice to be comfortable just from a day to the next. Just two day means I need more land to harvest enough energy from the Sun. Oh and that being in France south Alps so in a significantly sunny place. Oh I'm just talking about a home, not a factory.
Sure we can already made let's say a glass production AND recycling factory 100% circular and renewable, we just need mountain hydro nearby. Enough, perhaps, if we are Norway with many mountains, water, little population. Or maybe Iceland with geothermal. Hardly for France.
So far we have seen MANY promises in terms of new battery tech, but essentially nothing really ready. Potentially in 2050 we can even have finally achieved nuclear fusion, witch is renewable formally. But we can't forecast that. It's a hope. It might be even computed in a game-of-if: if we finally discover a battery tech with this and that characteristic we can produce on scale with this and that intensity what time it take to spread it? It's still a study, but just an hypothetical one.
What we see so far is that FOR HOMES we can made single-family homes almost everywhere and power that with electricity only at rate "small enough" to be sustainable even at some arctic latitudes. This on scale means we need abandon dense tall-buildings since YES, we can made them TODAY with similar energy needs BUT we can't really upgrade them in the future, so to be future proof we need homes like cars, with a longer life-cycle but still small enough to be created and re-created after a certain amount of times (like a single human life) to align them with current needs and tech at any point in time. It might be doable if we agree to do so even before 2050 at least in western world, but I see no real push to do so. Just few do so on their own, no plans to design a new society seems to go in that direction, UN New Urban Agenda goes actually in the OPPOSITE direction. The rest are collection of dreams.
[+] [-] sigmoid10|3 years ago|reply
Technology isn't what's stopping us from saving the planet, greedy corporations and corrupt politicians are.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
The deniers updated their messaging too, so you regularly see (and see in these comments today) people saying "Yeah, renewable energy is cheaper and cleaner but ... desperately makes up something to justify their believing lots of obvious lies ... in 2050 when we have lots of cheap, clean renewable energy something vague and bad will happen so we should just slow down and burn more fossil fuels for reasons.
So it's good to recognize that we now have better answers for the delaying tactic questions.
[+] [-] trinovantes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manytree|3 years ago|reply
Lol
[+] [-] ekianjo|3 years ago|reply
and the anti-nuclear crowd that has been brainwashed for 50 years
[+] [-] gonzo41|3 years ago|reply
frankly dealing with a monopoly and a bit of corruption is better than dealing with the effects of climate change.
[+] [-] Kim_Bruning|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
In both cases, the problem is explainable - here's a person sitting on an oil well that brings them US$10 million per year (or equivalent), resulting in a lifestyle of relative luxury and abundance, and you say to them, shut down that oil well, use your saved resources to put up solar and wind turbines and batteries to meet your regional energy needs, and reduce your yearly income by 90% as a result, because no more exports!
Short-sighted greed is certainly a universal phenomenon, we can conclude.
[+] [-] ThunderSizzle|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomp|3 years ago|reply
Hint: it’s not, it’s a massive failure, and stupid countries like Germany are now paying the price.
[+] [-] titzer|3 years ago|reply
It's almost like it was never about the economy, but just about keeping the existing set of corporations raking in the profits and protecting them from disruption.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|3 years ago|reply
Initially, not a lot of people believed this and it was kind of expensive to e.g. put solar on your roof and even make the argument that it was at all economical to do so. That changed a few years ago and people around the world are doing the math and coming to the conclusion that these systems pay for themselves in well under half their supposed life time. Ever since that became obvious, there is a lot of demand for solar panels. Companies building more or better panels are popping up everywhere. There's a lot of innovation happening. And the net result is better, cheaper, technology produced at a rapidly expanding scale. We have already hit the point that even the subsidies and incentives that are available for this are not technically needed any more.
IMHO, learning effects, and ongoing research will cause cost to drop much further still. We have nowhere near reached the point of what is technically feasible here at all. What happens when you drop the cost of energy by about 100x in a few decades or so? An economic boom is what happens. Things that used to be prohibitively expensive now become cheap to do. And people start doing these things as quickly as they can.
You might think 100x is an exaggeration. But actually, we've already experienced that with solar in the past 20 years. Price parity was reached more than 5 years ago. I'm actually talking about another 100x improvement So four orders of magnitude in total. About 2 orders relative to fossil fuel powered energy, which is a fair benchmark because that's what we are trying to get rid off. At some point renewables are going to be so obviously cheaper that they start pushing out anything more expensive out of the market. The cheaper things get, the faster that happens. The more it happens, the faster learning effects, R&D, etc. will happen. That massive acceleration is basically what is causing people to move targets.
[+] [-] missedthecue|3 years ago|reply
Repaving the highway every six months would "create" lots of jobs too.
[+] [-] ngmc|3 years ago|reply
Perhaps more directly relevant for the HN crowd, Tom Greenwood's book "Sustainable Web Design" [3] provides simple strategies for reducing the climate impacts of the software systems we build.
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/WWSBook...
[2] https://goodenergy.cc
[3] https://abookapart.com/products/sustainable-web-design/
[+] [-] Brakenshire|3 years ago|reply
Is model code available so that it can be run by any of us?
[+] [-] lettergram|3 years ago|reply
If you remove researchers who have differing opinions *of course* you’ll get the claims you want. Particularly, when those researchers are funded in a way that incentivizes particular claims.
Now to these easily debunked claims, look at energy production vs capacity vs consumption in Germany:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
Even though renewable energy capacity is 60% renewables, energy consumption is only 10% renewables.
This is every country. Because renewable energy comes in bursts. This also doesn’t include the fact it costs a ton of fossil fuel energy to produce a lot of these renewable systems (solar, wind turbines, batteries).
I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space. You’d also have to force countries like China and Russia with force… so good luck.
[+] [-] _ph_|3 years ago|reply
Renewable energy also doesn't come in "bursts". Yes, the maximum available production varies over time, for that we need to compensate. By storage, by grids, by having more flexible loads (for many decades providers worked hard to make loads non-flexible to make their jobs easier, now it is the other way around). And of course, some amount of power2gas will provide us with perfectly renewable gas which can be easily stored for whenever it is needed - we only want to limit that because it uses more power than using the electricity directly.
And no, to get there we are not "destroying quality of life". There is no idication it would even compared to our current quality of life. Quite the contrary, as cheap, clean energy will improve quality of life. You are also missing, that our quality of life isn't given. It currently is constantly reduced by the effects of climate change we are already experiencing. Europe is going through a catastrophic hot and dry summer. With ironically energy shortages as the water cooling for nuclear power plants is failing.
Just being able to maintain todays quality of life would be quite an accomplishment, which can only be achieved by cutting CO2 emissions very quickly, if at all.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
You make a lot of unsubstantiated, untrue and misleading claims, but just to drill into this one for people who haven't seen this classic dodge before:
"Primary Energy Consumption" measures all the energy in fossil fuels. About 2/3 of that energy is lost as waste heat when generating electricity which isn't actually useful for "quality of life" but people love quoting it to make renewables seem ridiculous.
When in fact, it's one of the main reasons they're a good idea and we should Electrify Everything:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545044/
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method
[+] [-] tcfhgj|3 years ago|reply
I don't know where you are taking renewable energy capacity from and what are you trying to say. Same goes for producing wind turbines, which actually doesn't require fossil fuel at all.
> I’m not saying this isn’t a “doable” goal, but only way you might get there by 2050 is destroying quality of life, population reduction and investing all resources into this space.
You couldn't make less baseless comments
[+] [-] naasking|3 years ago|reply
Any engineer could have told you that switching to renewables requires grid expansion and ideally energy storage with renewable overcapacity generation. The more grid expansion, the less storage you'll probably need and vice versa. Germany is just another case of politicians not listening to experts.
[+] [-] Deltioner|3 years ago|reply
Would be fine if your comment would actually criticize something not mention.
But it states that they include energy storage.
You 'facepalm and laugh ' while probably only skimming the article.
[+] [-] jrmg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yisonPylkita|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brakenshire|3 years ago|reply
Or it is that these intermittency gaps can be closed using long distance connectors? Has anyone done studies showing exactly where resources would need to be located and the length of connectors, modelled against weather and demand patterns?
[+] [-] gregwebs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl6|3 years ago|reply
There are also tons of other short-medium term storage solutions, and we probably need all of them that we can get our hands on, but hydrogen and ammonia are the ones that feel most likely to operate at grid scale.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
Suggests Great Britain would ideally have only 1% solar, and storing 8% of the wind production as Green Hydrogen
Doing it without Green Hydrogen, just solar wind batteries would double the cost.
Connectors help too, though they also cost money to build. As renewables and batteries have plummeted in price, connectors have become less necessary. Once you have Green Hydrogen you can ship it around and store it like LNG.
[+] [-] andy_ppp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitkat_new|3 years ago|reply
Wind has higher output during winter
[+] [-] naasking|3 years ago|reply
Grid expansion can average over regional lulls. Renewables also need to be built to provide significant overcapacity. Storage can help, but you can do it with only those two.
[+] [-] DoingIsLearning|3 years ago|reply
We have plenty of technical solutions, but they will all continue to face an enormous amount of friction due to Oil&Gas profits/lobby.
We need a political solution and we need to have an honest debate on how to sunset a trillion dollar industry without them putting up a fight.
[+] [-] jsty|3 years ago|reply
Compared to the difficulty in getting these nations to play a full and productive part in any transition (requiring essentially restructuring a large chunk of their economies), settling up with extractor companies will be a walk in the park.
[+] [-] zokier|3 years ago|reply
idk, to me saying that fossils can be replaced by 2050 is pretty much same as saying that climate change cannot be stopped. I think the discussion has largely moved from preventing the climate change to trying manage how bad it will be, as it seems pretty inevitable at this point.
[+] [-] xbryanx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
We all understand how difficult software development time estimation is, right?
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
> "Many young people are depressed because they feel climate change cannot be stopped. We want to offer them hope by showing that our world can get all its energy needs from renewables at a price below that of fossil fuels. When we first proposed this, we were ridiculed, but this paper shows our ideas are now scientific mainstream", says Auke Hoekstra from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands."
The one (going to 100% renewables) no longer implies the other (stabilizing the climate system within the lifetime of anyone alive today). Hugely expensive steps must be taken - retreat from flood plains that will be experiencing 500-year floods every 5 years, securing water supplies to survive epic droughts (with the additional loss of much of the seasonal snowpack in many regions), building termite-mound like architecture to handle the record heat waves, moving critical infrastructure back from the coastlines to deal with rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion, dealing with insects that love these new warm conditions, etc.
On top of that, replacing the existing fossil fuel infrastructure is going to cost trillions and require a complete reorganization of the global economic system - just look at all the oil tankers, pipelines, internal combustion engines, gas-and-coal fired power plants. No time to watch TikTok videos, it's going to be work, work, work. Scaling up industrial production of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries by a factor of what, 100X? Better get busy, humans.
Think of it more as an exciting challenge, adapting to these frightening new conditions - interesting times!. Of course, we'll have to raid the wealth of the fossil fuel sector and their investors to pay for all this adaptation and industrial development. Sticking the major producers with the bill makes optional sense. Implementing a ban on the global trade in fossil fuels would also be reasonable under these conditions (note that this was the first major step in eliminating the practice of chattel slavery, for comparison).
[+] [-] HidyBush|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfung|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frankfrankfrank|3 years ago|reply
It is rather surprising to me how people who used to rail against the "evil corporation" now love them some evil corporation simply because evil corporations have been created to pilfer society through renewable energy.
It could be a scene from 1984; yesterday the people hate corporations they always have been at war with and always will be, today they have been told to love corporations and they do so with zealous mania.
[+] [-] icu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikVandeWater|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MadSudaca|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bedhead|3 years ago|reply
This is a common insidious tactic of the media…pay attention to how presumptuous they are especially in headlines. I can’t even keep track of how many baseless claims they make as if they’re accepted fact anymore.
[+] [-] seydor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewclunn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kkfx|3 years ago|reply
Beside that: I doubt. Cyclically we see promise, like IBM research that cyclically say they achieve a hyper-big advances in storage, something that "in the near future" can store Zettabyte of data in a rice grain etc, and I still have to see anything even similar. I have built my new home, just six years ago, well insulated, airtight, with proper ventilation, recently upgraded from passive temperature recovery (classic VMC with a paper heat-exchanger) to a heat-pump one, with a small p.v. and lithium storage, all electric again with heat-pumps etc. well it can potentially be "autonomous" IF I'm willing to waste a very big amount of money in a very big battery, much more space for solar panels to have enough energy to recharge the bigger battery AND still depending on a grid or generator for backup because a "reasonably bigger" battery (BEVs alike size) suffice to be comfortable just from a day to the next. Just two day means I need more land to harvest enough energy from the Sun. Oh and that being in France south Alps so in a significantly sunny place. Oh I'm just talking about a home, not a factory.
Sure we can already made let's say a glass production AND recycling factory 100% circular and renewable, we just need mountain hydro nearby. Enough, perhaps, if we are Norway with many mountains, water, little population. Or maybe Iceland with geothermal. Hardly for France.
So far we have seen MANY promises in terms of new battery tech, but essentially nothing really ready. Potentially in 2050 we can even have finally achieved nuclear fusion, witch is renewable formally. But we can't forecast that. It's a hope. It might be even computed in a game-of-if: if we finally discover a battery tech with this and that characteristic we can produce on scale with this and that intensity what time it take to spread it? It's still a study, but just an hypothetical one.
What we see so far is that FOR HOMES we can made single-family homes almost everywhere and power that with electricity only at rate "small enough" to be sustainable even at some arctic latitudes. This on scale means we need abandon dense tall-buildings since YES, we can made them TODAY with similar energy needs BUT we can't really upgrade them in the future, so to be future proof we need homes like cars, with a longer life-cycle but still small enough to be created and re-created after a certain amount of times (like a single human life) to align them with current needs and tech at any point in time. It might be doable if we agree to do so even before 2050 at least in western world, but I see no real push to do so. Just few do so on their own, no plans to design a new society seems to go in that direction, UN New Urban Agenda goes actually in the OPPOSITE direction. The rest are collection of dreams.
[+] [-] Linda703|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] osipov|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fzfaa|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]