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This graph is a great reality check: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy Humanity

This graph is a great reality check: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with a new one. Instead total energy usage grows. Our only success with fossil fuel usage reduction is that coal usage is no longer growing. Growing wind, solar, and nuclear by 10x from the 2019 levels reported in that data set would put them (as a combination) on par with one of the three big existing fossil fuel sources. But this can only decrease fossil fuel usage if increased energy usage does not take up all those gains as it has always done in the past. I do think though that reducing fossil fuel usage could be possible now only because of the shifting demographics of the world (most of the world is starting a population decline). The counter argument is that a large portion of the world will continue to grow economically (increases energy usage) and become wealthy enough to start air conditioning and otherwise dramatically increase energy usage.

me_me_me 5y ago
Well Germany is closing down their nuclear power plants, under excuses of damage and recent Chernobyl series. While actively funding Nord Stream 2. So there goes your green EU. If we are to survive climate change we would have to cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders. They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. After all they all will be able to afford ticket to Elysium.
- La1n 5y ago
  > under excuses of damage and recent Chernobyl series. Actually it has been a way longer process starting in 2000/2001[1], with Fukushima having a significant impact.[2] It doesn't seem the Chernobyl series was responsible. [1] https://www.terradaily.com/2003/031114130333.jlvf6wjx.html https://www.terradaily.com/2003/031114130333.jlvf6wjx.html [2] http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/4/14.abstract http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/4/14.abstract
  - kuxv 5y ago
    I always wondered why was Germany concerned about the events in Fukushima as that was caused by the earthquake/tsunami. Is that a common phenomenon in Germany?
    - ratww 5y ago
      It’s not. The whole reason is historical, because of Chernobyl, Sellafield, the Fukushima. People have been wary for years. Netflix series Dark reflects this mindset pretty well. The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government.
      - mschuster91 5y ago
        > The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government. German here. We Europeans also have another issue: where to put the waste. Unlike Americans who have lots of deserts where no one gives a flying f..k about anything you dump there because there is no human life in a hundred km range, Europe is densely populated and surprisingly people don't want to live near a nuclear waste dump. Additionally, unlike Americans we have personal experience with nuclear disaster from Chernobyl - to this day, many decades after the event, you have to check wild pigs and fungi in Bavaria for radioactivity if you want to sell them. And current operators of nuclear plants haven't been exactly trustworthy, given many thousands of incident reports of which quite a number can be boiled down to shoddy construction or maintenance. On top of that, we have had massive fuck-ups of our governments in the attempts to find a permanent storage site: - former salt mine "Asse" which was used from 1967-1978 turned to be a colossal disaster - the barrels rusted and leaked, to make it worse it was known at the time that the barrels would only last three years, and now it's estimated to need billions of euros for retrieval of all the waste - former salt mine "Gorleben" was inspected from 1979-2000 as a permanent storage site, but (again) it came out that the location was chosen for political reasons, not scientific - former GDR site "Morsleben" is unstable, needing billions of euros to prevent collapse - current projects to search a new final site are expecting to take until (at least) 2031 with finalization of storage in year 2095-2170 (!!!), at a total cost of 50-170 billion euros. As a result of all of this - especially the last point, who can even guarantee there will be a German nation in over 150 years of time from now?! - German public is extremely skeptic of nuclear energy. In other European nations, French and British projects for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns. Even if there were public support for nuclear energy, no one trusts government to complete such projects in time and budget anymore, further weakening nuclear energy. Edit: Totally forgot about the boatload of issues involving power plants europe-wide, see e.g. https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nuclear-reactors-pose-significant-safety-risks/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nucl... for a list. You really have anything there, from fundamental construction issues over your run-off-the-mill accident and old age (many plants are 30 years or older) to outright gross negligence. To put it short: We Europeans can't operate nuclear power responsibly, no matter if organized under capitalist, communist or modern-ish government control. There won't be much of a future for nuclear fission power in Europe, no matter what some of our bought-off leaders (Macron, Orban) spout.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Nuclear is a tiny sliver in that chart. If decarbonization takes 1.3% longer because we also get rid of nuclear I think few people will complain. It would of course be nice for the climate to first shut off coal plants and then nuclear plants, but it's hard to get a majority for that in Germany's current political climate.
  - 0xfaded 5y ago
    Its not so different from the covid vaccines. We don't need a solution. We need every solution available.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      I completely agree and would be in favor of keeping nuclear power running. But I think that shutting off nuclear early is a very minor mistake compared to the general energy policy.
    - legulere 5y ago
      You can achieve much more per Euro though with renewables than nuclear.
      - hik 5y ago
        That is technically correct today. But that is because there are many problems with renewables that only really start to appear at scale. In the United States - many utilities gave up literal free money from the Federal Government on renewable deployment because it was creating problems with the grid at like, 2% of use. Nuclear is a drop in replacement for coal or natural gas.
- j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
  > They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. Just like all the consumers buying all that stuff and just like all voters not voting for politicians that would change something? Yeah but sure, it's always "the elites" fault.
  - akudha 5y ago
    Do you realize the amount of money poured into propaganda/brain washing of the electorate? Even if all voters suddenly become super informed overnight, it is still hard to vote for good politicians (the very few) because of issues like gerrymandering etc? Yes, voters should take responsibility. But too much destruction comes from the elites. But feel free to support them. When this planet is ravaged by the effects of climate change, no elite will help you. They have their bunkers built and ready to move in.
    - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
      Gerrymandering is only a problem (with respect to climate change) if around half of the voters don't care about climate change. As you said, there are good politicians. Its us that do not vote for them. In Germany, it was always the same: in between elections, the Green party have really nice results in polls. However, when it comes to the election, people prefer reducing (or not increasing) taxes and stuff over fixing the climate. People DO know about climate change. There IS good information available online. Its not that people have no idea what's happening. They just don't care to do something themselves - there's enough other people to fix it. Its like an email with lots of recipients, no one feels responsible to reply. > But feel free to support them. I never said I support them. I said we could easily get rid of them, of we only wanted to. The problem is (half of) the people around you, not the elites put in power by them.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Gerrymandering can give a great deal of power to ~26% of the population. It takes just over 1/2 the seats in a congress to control legislation, and ~1/2 the voters in those locations. 1/2 * ~1/2 ~= 1/4 The US senate is even more extreme. Wyoming at 578,759 people has exactly as much power as California with 39,512,223. Clearly a party aiming to minimize the number of voters it needs to please would avoid California. After all if you get the right 10% of voters you win and who cares about anything else.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  It's unfortunate you are being downvoted because you have a lot valid points. > If we are to survive climate change we would have to cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders. They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. I agree this is the inevitable end of this trajectory. Eventually there will be environmental extreme groups that will target fossil fuel leaders. Controversially, ignoring the ethical aspects of this, it would be an incentives equalizer to precipitate real climate regulation. Currently there is no incentive to do so, this dynamics would change with a palpable fear of immediate injury/death.
  - hedgedoops2 5y ago
    Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits through carbon capture / sequestration, and tighten the emissions cap. For 4% of global GDP you could stop/compensate global co2 emissions based on current carbon capture technology's prices per ton of co2 removed. [1] If there were a business case for CCS, the cost would come further down. Currently there is no profit in it. One would need to restrict the allowed methods to safe and scalable ones (like extraction from seawater, not ocean seeding). [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk for prices and methods + https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock.htm https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock... + simplistic back of envelope calculation (assumes cost scales up linearly)
    - einpoklum 5y ago
      Carbon credits are a mechanism by which excessive pollution is supposedly legitimized by other actions. It's a rather nefarious scheme IMHO. We should treat the activities of governments, companies and other organizations in a disaggregated fashion: Pumping out CO_2 and other pollutants into the air should be penalized, and engaging in CO_2-and-methane-sequestering activity (e.g. forestation) should be encouraged, independently of one another.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      > Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits through carbon capture / sequestration, Except companies will go for the cheapest possible solution that “counts” for carbon credits, which is probably entirely fraudulent.
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  The German public (and especially the Green party) has been against nuclear power not since the Chernobyl TV series (which I think didn't tell anything new to most Germans), but since the original Chernobyl incident in 1986. Chernobyl was most likely the catalyst of why the Greens became so popular in Germany in the first place. And now that they are becoming the most powerful political force, don't expect the German stance towards nuclear power to change in the next few decades. (to be clear, I fully support the decommission of European nuclear plants, Europe is just too small and too densely populated to risk nuclear accidents, or for long term storage of nuclear waste)
  - jopsen 5y ago
    > Europe is just too small and too densely populated to risk nuklear accidents. Maybe, if we built new safe reactors it wouldn't be a problem. That said, it's probably faster to go renewable -- so is it too much to ask that Germany doesn't build more cold fired plants?
    - flohofwoe 5y ago
      As far as I'm aware, no new coal plants will be built: https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-online/ https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-... Coal seems to be roughly on the same trajectory as nuclear, and since around 2015 on a much sharper decline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
      - pantalaimon 5y ago
        Datteln 4 just started operating last year
        flohofwoe 5y ago
        And that was the last one, meanwhile 8 other coal power plants had been closed in the same year. Planning and building power plants takes a long time, especially in Germany, where all big construction projects take forever. It's clear that there's gonna be some overlap between old and new plans.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  The only way to "cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders" is realize that wind and solar can't provide base power at rates people can afford. And if people have to spend too much on electricity, they'll vote in new "politicians and dirty industry leaders", like Germany's (and soon France's) return to coal burning. If we started today with nuclear, we could trivially hit the 1.5C IPCC goal. Hell, we could likely hit it if the world started fracking and moved to wind/natgas plants (like the US is doing rapidly). But at least for now, nuclear and fracking are less preferable than >2C warming to nearly all climate change advocates.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    I wish someone would do to the energy industry what SpaceX did to the space industry. Prove to the world what is now possible instead of excuse after excuse of defending the status quo.
    - rndmize 5y ago
      Arguably Tesla is doing exactly that. Solar is cheap and available these days, wind is growing consistently. The main issue is smoothing out the spikiness of these sources as they scale to significant parts of the grid. Tesla is the only company I hear about in a real "boots on the ground" kind of way, with notable projects deployed in recent years and a consistent effort to scale those projects up - everything else I've seen is in development, barely started, or vaporware.
  - antisthenes 5y ago
    > If we started today with nuclear, we could trivially hit the 1.5C IPCC goal. Just wanted to point out that this is nonsense. We already have 2C of warming baked in, if we go to net zero today, which is a complete fantasy. In fact we're likely to reach 1.5C of warming before those nuclear plants (that you propose we get started on) even come online. Did you even look at the graph in the top post in the thread?
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  Germany is also the worlds largest lignite miner and won't shut down it's coal plants before 2038.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Shutting down all coal plants before 2038 isn't the same thing as running them until 2038.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  > cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders Hello. Would it be possible to have a conversation about climate change that does not involve the suggestion that humans be killed en masse, in the manner of diseased animals? Thank you.
  - s21n 5y ago
    Why not? “If you truly claim to represent the people of the future, Frank asks — people who have the exact same right to a livable planet that we do — doesn’t that mean you should be willing to kill in their defense? Not as a first choice, not as the only choice — but can you really take it off the table? ‘If your organization represents the people who will be born after us, well, that’s a heavy burden! It’s a real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have to do what they would do if they were here,’ Frank argues. ‘I don’t think they would countenance murder,’ retorts Mary, to which Frank replies, ‘Of course they would!’ The Ministry for the Future is thus a novel about bureaucracy, but it’s also about the possibility of a wide diversity of tactics in the name of a livable future that include fighting both inside and outside the system. Characters in the novel contemplate targeted assassination of politicians and CEOs, industrial sabotage of coal plants, intentionally bringing down airliners in the name of destroying commercial air travel, bioterrorism against industrial slaughterhouses — and they do more than contemplate them. How does it change what’s possible when we stop worrying so much about losing in the right way, and start thinking about winning in the wrong ways?” [1] To be honest, I'm surprised we're not seeing more acts of eco-terrorism yet. There are only isolated incidents of infrastructure sabotage. [2] I think it will change if (when) we don't meet the 2030 emission targets. 1. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/of-course-they-would-on-kim-stanley-robinsons-the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/of-course-they-would-on-... 2. https://theintercept.com/2019/10/04/dakota-access-pipeline-sabotage/ https://theintercept.com/2019/10/04/dakota-access-pipeline-s...
    - splithalf 5y ago
      “surprised we're not seeing more acts of eco-terrorism yet“ People don’t work the way you think they do, yet.
    - 5y ago
- api 5y ago
  The politicians do what corporations and voters want or they get replaced by politicians who will. Corporations want profit. People want jobs and products.
- fredm-de 5y ago
  The trigger for the decision was not the recent Chernobyl series but the Fukushima incident combined with an important election. If Fukushima would have happened a month later, Germany probably wouldn't have decided to shut down it's unclear power plants. On October 28th 2010 the German government (CDU & FPD) voted to prolong the usage of its existing power plants for another 8 years. Fukushima happened on March 11th 2011. Put under pressure by an increasing poll numbers of the (anti-nuclear) Green Party and having a state election upcoming on March 27th the same government decided to close down the power plants.
  - hnbad 5y ago
    Well, the German Greens (along with NGOs like Greenpeace) have always campaigned against nuclear in a way that very effectively shaped public opinion to allow Merkel to use the Fukushima scare as an opportunity to shut down nuclear power. Note that Germany's newest nuclear power plants were built in 1982, before the Chernobyl incident and before the merger of the West German Greens with the East German progressive movement (which made the party more politically relevant). This resulted in lifetimes of existing nuclear plants continuously being extended, which in terms of safety was much worse than building new ones. There are six plants currently still operating, half of which are scheduled to be shut down by the end of this year, the other half scheduled to be shut down by the end of next year. Ironically, the nuclear scares have not resulted in a massive expansion of renewables but in a strengthening of fossil fuels and especially coal (which is heavily subsidized and has even led to land being expropriated "in the common interest" to allow energy companies to harvest lignite). As of 2018 Germany has vague goals about abolishing coal power by 2038 due to public pressure but in the most optimistic scenarios this doesn't involve shutting down any coal plants before 2035. That this is being discussed by (conservative and centrist) government officials at all is only the result of the Fridays For Future protests and related spillover movements (XR and more specifically "Ende Gelände", a series of protests directly targeting the surface mining sites).
  - the-dude 5y ago
    > shut down it's unclear power plants. Now that is a typo if I ever saw one.
- legulere 5y ago
  Germany manages to reduce fossil fuel use though: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei%3AEnergiemix_Deutschland.svg https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei%3AEn... (Personally I would have preferred to shut down coal first, but old nuclear plants are a risk and new ones are too expensive)
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Is this why we still use whale fat? Idiot.
spodek 5y ago
Exactly. Tragically, people think individual action doesn't achieve anything, but they measure the wrong thing, that one person's impact on one or two actions. Our greatest impact is in leading others, which multiplies. To lead others we must first lead ourselves. My personal actions have led me to consult corporate executives, mayors, congressmembers, and other influential people. From the article: > not yet investing at sufficient scale in technologies that support fast decarbonisation of their economies The most effective "technology" is to consume less. What will do that is acting on different values, instead of growth, enjoying what we have, instead of efficiency, resilience, instead of comfort and convenience, meaning, purpose, and the satisfaction of a job well done. Human societies lived with those values for hundreds of thousands of years in some cases, and centuries in many others, with higher markers of health, longevity, stability, and equality than our culture until very recently, but those markers are going back down. And will drop precipitously if we don't return to those values. Population growth may be leveling off in the most polluting nations, but it's globally growing and over sustainable levels. Economically we can sustain population decreasing and many nations have lowered birth rates with the opposite of the One Child Policy coercion or eugenics, purely voluntary, noncoercive, leading to stability, health, and abundance. > “Every day, we witness the worsening consequences of the climate crisis for communities around the world – farmers’ crops failing; floods and fires engulfing towns and villages; families facing an uncertain future." We can dance around sustainability issues all we want, we eventually reach both overpopulation and overconsumption, both driven by growth, both driven by cultural beliefs and values we can change. This community loves nuclear, but without considering your point, that we aren't using new energies to replace but to augment. If we ever expect to stop growing and instead shrinking our polluting behavior, the sooner the better, as in now, which requires leadership more like Churchill, Mandela, MLK, and peers, not new technology. It costs nothing and improves our lives. When we learn to reduce consumption, nuclear will help. With our current values, we'll keep growing until hitting its limits, back where we are now, but with more people and dependency, making reduction harder. To quantify all this, I recommend Tom Murphy's book Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, which I wrote about https://joshuaspodek.com/the-science-book-of-the-decade-energy-and-human-ambitions-on-a-finite-planet-by-tom-murphy https://joshuaspodek.com/the-science-book-of-the-decade-ener....
tjbiddle 5y ago
Interesting. Looking at the same graph - especially when you tweak it to show only the last decade - you'll see solar is growing very quickly (25% YoY) while the others stay fairly stable. That would have it overtaking oil in 20 years. Considering we're going to see mass adoption of electric vehicles in the next 5-20 years I think that will happen even more quickly.
- Aicy 5y ago
  Only if you assume that the growth is expoential / compounding. I don't know much about the field, but given the vast investments and land needed for country level solar projects I would argue the growth rate is much more likely to be linear, in which case it looks like it won't be overtaking oil this century. It's relatively easy to make large percentage gains when the current amount is so small.
  - gregwebs 5y ago
    Solar already hit a supply shock this year that has increased the cost of installation (it has been reliably going down before this). Solar growth is expected to be closer to just linear this year. I hope this is temporary due to all the supply shocks going on right now. Looking longer-term there will be growth slow-down when wind/solar reaches a larger scale due to the intermittent nature of the energy unless we can figure out how to deal with this. Currently dealing with it requires lots of gas peaker plants, hydro (which has its own environmental damages) or batteries (the resources required to produce and continually replace these are not sustainable but hopefully the net carbon emission can stay low). Malaysia recently had to stop incentivizing solar because their grid couldn't handle it.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      There was a similar price shock back around 2010 (?) due to polysilicon shortage. After the hand wringing about how the learning curve was over, capacity increased, and prices continued downward, making up for lost time.
- gregwebs 5y ago
globular-toast 5y ago
Humans never willingly decrease their footprint. Even technology that is supposed to "save money" won't be used to decrease overall footprint. People want to save money so they can get more in other areas. Technology that simply reduces overall footprint doesn't sell. Technology will not save us.
- chess_buster 5y ago
  Counter point: In Germany we are moving from heating generated from coal and oil to heat generated by heat pumps.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    Which is largely driven by government regulation. This is not people doing it willingly just for the sake of reducing consumption. Governments have the power to do things like this. But even then, it remains to be seen if this will actually reduce overall energy usage. It could simply mean people keep their houses warmer/cooler all year round and energy usage stays the same. Or the "saved" energy merely gets diverted to some other use.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Yes, leaving fossil fuels in the ground will be because governments stop people from using them. This will involve laws and guns.
einpoklum 5y ago
> Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with a new one. Instead total energy usage grows. Our only success with fossil fuel usage reduction is that coal usage is no longer growing. That is a misrepresentation. The fact that a bunch of other people in another country use, say, more biomass now than in the past since there are more of them than in the past, does not mean that in your country there hasn't been a displacement of biomass with, say, coal. And indeed, coal had displaced biomass in many countries in the world. And natural gas displaced coal in some places.
- gregwebs 5y ago
  I agree with your statement. However, we need to keep in mind that displacing an energy supply in one country keeps the resource available and the price lower so that another country may use more of it. We may have real success with reducing coal usage soon since it is much less economically viable to transport it long distances. We need to also keep in mind where energy is being used the most now and in the future. In the long-term Europe going 100% renewable by itself doesn't change the global energy picture much. The greater effect is the leading role they play demonstrating how it can be done and further developing renewable technology.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Counterpoint, while it’s true we still use things like coal, what we do with them has changed massively. Coal in the 1850s was all about metal working, steam production (train and ship), and home heating, uses that have been almost entirely replaced. Coal fired power plants came surprisingly later, with most units coming online in America between 1910 and 1950, a time in which trains and ships largely went electric or to diesel. Also, our history of energy production is very short. I’d be disinclined to say that it’s impossible based on a mere 200 year sample.
- gregwebs 5y ago
  That's not a counterpoint, it is a case in point! There are some energy sources like whale oil that had supply issues and roughly a single use that got displaced. But for our major energy sources with a vast supply we keep finding ways to use them in amounts that don't really decrease.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    It's kind of a counterpoint still. We tried and managed to replace coal for home heating and transport with something else, because coal kind of sucks for those things. The fact that coal continued to be used in new ways is a consequence of coal dropping in price and there being no real external pressure to eliminate coal usage. It's not clear what happens once there's strong pressure to eliminate these fuels from our economy, because we've never really tried it before.
analognoise 5y ago
"Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with a new one." I'm having trouble finding whale oil for my vintage lamp...
thehappypm 5y ago
I mean.. in 1800 the main source of power for transportation and industry was wind and water. In 1850 it was coal.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  Because fossil fuels are the best energy source, absolutely smashing the competition circa 1850 and still the top contender today. If we found a comparable energy source today that checked all the same boxes as fossil fuels, sans climate change and plus energy density, we'd be all over it tomorrow.
- gregwebs 5y ago
  But the energy usage increased dramatically. So it is possible that the usage of wind power and water power never declined much (it would be interesting to see data for this). A clearer case might be something like using animal power (for plowing and transportation) but I think this idea only applies to resources that have a ready and easy to expand supply.
boringg 5y ago
Displacing fossil fuel for mobility with green hydrogen + electricity will reduce a large portion of those energy sources. Hydrogen for heating + for shipping + heavy duty transit -- more. California has already decoupled increasing amounts of electricity use and emissions through a combination of policies to increase adoption of renewables and through codes and standards for home heating/insulation/good build practices. So while your statement may resonate with some of the past - it does not handcuff us to a future trajectory. It is possible to change and it is happening - it just needs to happen faster and increase in its scale. Also - we did stop using whale oil in the early 1900s so your statement is not 100%.
- gregwebs 5y ago
  Whales were going to go extinct so I don’t think there was much choice. Also it had just one main use at the time for oil lamps. That can certainly be disrupted. But if it was a plentiful source it may have been possible to figure out how to use it more broadly. I agree that history is not destiny. But in this case only if we first understand history.
  - FooHentai 5y ago
    Random aside, the fantasy world in the Dishonoured games series is a parallel version to ours wherein whale oil formed the basis for the industrial revolution. This is I think a riff on the Fallout universe, where the transistor was never invented and electronics still bloomed via it's predecessor, vacuum tube technology.
sandworm101 5y ago
>> Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with a new one. Instead total energy usage grows. Which is why any efforts based on reducing energy use are doomed to fail. "Do more with less" sounds great but goes against human nature to expand and collect resources. The push should always be to make energy cheaper or more green, not to curtail energy use. An effort to power air conditioners using solar: good, people will get behind that. More efficient air conditioners that use less power: great. Telling people they must reduce air conditioning and just live in hot: bad, doomed to fail. So bring on the solar panels. The mob will support you. Just don't tell that mob they must do with less.
- gregwebs 5y ago
  Actually I suspect we need both approaches. But I agree we need to both support economic needs and make it not feel like extra work to use less energy (although there may be some extra up front costs).
- N1H1L 5y ago
  Total energy usage has stopped growing for most of the developed world for the past decade.
EcoMonkey 5y ago
This is a primary reason that we need a carbon tax. Building out renewables and stopping there will just make energy cheaper and induce demand. A carbon tax will actually change the energy mix by making carbon-intensive energy sources more expensive relative to less carbon-intensive sources. Speaking of visual reality checks, check out En-ROADS, which was built in collaboration with MIT to simulate different policy interventions. Check out the carbon price slider compared to everything else: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7.39 https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7.... My favorite thing to do with the money from a carbon tax is to just give it back to everyone as equal dividends, to offset any regressive effects of the carbon tax without creating tons of loopholes with another more complex disbursement scheme. This is called carbon fee and dividend. The IPCC finds with high confidence that we need a high price on carbon to stay under 1.5C. PDF warning: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15_Chapter2_Low_Res.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15... A policy framework without a carbon tax is not serious about getting emissions down.
asdff 5y ago
Nixon wanted to have 1000 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. by the year 2000. Today there are 60. Would this law have still applied if we followed up with our planned nuclear infrastructure?
- gregwebs 5y ago
  If we presume that the entire US became gradually powered by nuclear (along with solar, wind, and hydro), we probably wouldn't have ever seen an actual global decline in fossil fuel usage at any point other than perhaps coal by a little. Total fossil fuel usage today would be lower though, but this would make oil cheaper for the rest of the world which would lead to greater oil consumption in the rest of the world than what we have historically had. The US would also need to lead the rest of the world to adopt nuclear as well.
defaultname 5y ago
I'm not sure if this is a "reality check", and it sounds suspiciously similar to the "population explosion" claims. US electricity and gasoline consumption has declined since 2010, despite a growing GDP and almost 20 million more people. Efficiency and conservation have achieved enormous gains, and every renewable source that comes online displaces an existing one. This has occurred across every developed nation. Japan is using 20% less energy today than it did in 2000. Germany, France, Italy, Canada -- all below 2000. As developing countries bring more of their population into more modern accouterments, of course the total is increasing -- for now -- but thankfully most are starting with a much greater mix of reasonable sources.
- gregwebs 5y ago
  I agree that Europe is having real success. But we need to also keep in mind where energy is being used the most now and in the future. In the long-term Europe going 100% renewable by itself doesn't change the global energy picture much. Displacing a global energy supply in one country keeps the resource available and the price lower so that another country may use more of it. We may have actual success with reducing global coal usage soon since it does not transport easily. I can't find data to back up your claims about the US decreasing electricity and gasoline consumption. Do you mean per capita? Meanwhile natural gas consumption is increasing. I also suspect that the US has outsourced much of our energy usage to China in the form of manufacturing. China now uses much more energy that the US (although not per capita). Developing countries may have a head start with renewables now, but AFAIK their overall energy usage still implies increased fossil fuel usage for the world. I don't believe this means we are in a hopeless situation. I think it means that Europe and the US must prioritize using their wealth to further develop the technology for carbon neutral energy and to demonstrate it so that it becomes the default energy source for the entire world.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    No, I mean in total. US energy consumption across the board has declined. Even in total energy consumption (every plane, train, automobile, factory, office, microwave, etc) the US is currently about equal with 2000. I mean, it was equal before COVID hit, and is measurably lower now (which will likely continue as fewer people commute) 21 years later, with an improving quality of life, and almost 50 million extra people (almost 20% more), aggregate energy use for the entire nation is static and declining. There remain enormous opportunities for efficiency, a lot of it simply in normal ongoing modernization. Wind and solar are already cheaper than any other source but natural gas, which itself is a precarious source that most nations aren't in a geopolitical situation to rely upon. I find it odd that you question my facts given that there is literally nothing that claims otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
stragio 5y ago
Why it's going to be hard to go for green energy: https://braveneweurope.com/alf-hornborg-a-globalised-solar-powered-future-is-wholly-unrealistic-and-our-economy-is-the-reason-why https://braveneweurope.com/alf-hornborg-a-globalised-solar-p...
andy_ppp 5y ago
I guess the graph ends somewhere and my guess is we largely stop using energy during the coming nuclear winter.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Of course they can't. Nuclear is about the only viable way currently, but "greenies" won't have that. I think eventually they'll have to accept it as well the climate skeptics. I certainly hope solar comes up from the rear and surprises me, but unless we have a 100x breakthrough in energy storage (batteries or something more exotic) I don't see it happening. I guess a break through in solar->biofuel energy conversion might also be sufficient for it to replace fossil fuels completely.

me_me_me 5y ago

Well Germany is closing down their nuclear power plants, under excuses of damage and recent Chernobyl series. While actively funding Nord Stream 2. So there goes your green EU. If we are to survive climate change we would have to cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders. They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. After all they all will be able to afford ticket to Elysium.

La1n 5y ago
> under excuses of damage and recent Chernobyl series. Actually it has been a way longer process starting in 2000/2001[1], with Fukushima having a significant impact.[2] It doesn't seem the Chernobyl series was responsible. [1] https://www.terradaily.com/2003/031114130333.jlvf6wjx.html https://www.terradaily.com/2003/031114130333.jlvf6wjx.html [2] http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/4/14.abstract http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/4/14.abstract
- kuxv 5y ago
  I always wondered why was Germany concerned about the events in Fukushima as that was caused by the earthquake/tsunami. Is that a common phenomenon in Germany?
  - ratww 5y ago
    It’s not. The whole reason is historical, because of Chernobyl, Sellafield, the Fukushima. People have been wary for years. Netflix series Dark reflects this mindset pretty well. The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government. German here. We Europeans also have another issue: where to put the waste. Unlike Americans who have lots of deserts where no one gives a flying f..k about anything you dump there because there is no human life in a hundred km range, Europe is densely populated and surprisingly people don't want to live near a nuclear waste dump. Additionally, unlike Americans we have personal experience with nuclear disaster from Chernobyl - to this day, many decades after the event, you have to check wild pigs and fungi in Bavaria for radioactivity if you want to sell them. And current operators of nuclear plants haven't been exactly trustworthy, given many thousands of incident reports of which quite a number can be boiled down to shoddy construction or maintenance. On top of that, we have had massive fuck-ups of our governments in the attempts to find a permanent storage site: - former salt mine "Asse" which was used from 1967-1978 turned to be a colossal disaster - the barrels rusted and leaked, to make it worse it was known at the time that the barrels would only last three years, and now it's estimated to need billions of euros for retrieval of all the waste - former salt mine "Gorleben" was inspected from 1979-2000 as a permanent storage site, but (again) it came out that the location was chosen for political reasons, not scientific - former GDR site "Morsleben" is unstable, needing billions of euros to prevent collapse - current projects to search a new final site are expecting to take until (at least) 2031 with finalization of storage in year 2095-2170 (!!!), at a total cost of 50-170 billion euros. As a result of all of this - especially the last point, who can even guarantee there will be a German nation in over 150 years of time from now?! - German public is extremely skeptic of nuclear energy. In other European nations, French and British projects for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns. Even if there were public support for nuclear energy, no one trusts government to complete such projects in time and budget anymore, further weakening nuclear energy. Edit: Totally forgot about the boatload of issues involving power plants europe-wide, see e.g. https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nuclear-reactors-pose-significant-safety-risks/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nucl... for a list. You really have anything there, from fundamental construction issues over your run-off-the-mill accident and old age (many plants are 30 years or older) to outright gross negligence. To put it short: We Europeans can't operate nuclear power responsibly, no matter if organized under capitalist, communist or modern-ish government control. There won't be much of a future for nuclear fission power in Europe, no matter what some of our bought-off leaders (Macron, Orban) spout.
adrianN 5y ago
Nuclear is a tiny sliver in that chart. If decarbonization takes 1.3% longer because we also get rid of nuclear I think few people will complain. It would of course be nice for the climate to first shut off coal plants and then nuclear plants, but it's hard to get a majority for that in Germany's current political climate.
- 0xfaded 5y ago
  Its not so different from the covid vaccines. We don't need a solution. We need every solution available.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    I completely agree and would be in favor of keeping nuclear power running. But I think that shutting off nuclear early is a very minor mistake compared to the general energy policy.
  - legulere 5y ago
    You can achieve much more per Euro though with renewables than nuclear.
    - hik 5y ago
      That is technically correct today. But that is because there are many problems with renewables that only really start to appear at scale. In the United States - many utilities gave up literal free money from the Federal Government on renewable deployment because it was creating problems with the grid at like, 2% of use. Nuclear is a drop in replacement for coal or natural gas.
j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
> They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. Just like all the consumers buying all that stuff and just like all voters not voting for politicians that would change something? Yeah but sure, it's always "the elites" fault.
- akudha 5y ago
  Do you realize the amount of money poured into propaganda/brain washing of the electorate? Even if all voters suddenly become super informed overnight, it is still hard to vote for good politicians (the very few) because of issues like gerrymandering etc? Yes, voters should take responsibility. But too much destruction comes from the elites. But feel free to support them. When this planet is ravaged by the effects of climate change, no elite will help you. They have their bunkers built and ready to move in.
  - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
    Gerrymandering is only a problem (with respect to climate change) if around half of the voters don't care about climate change. As you said, there are good politicians. Its us that do not vote for them. In Germany, it was always the same: in between elections, the Green party have really nice results in polls. However, when it comes to the election, people prefer reducing (or not increasing) taxes and stuff over fixing the climate. People DO know about climate change. There IS good information available online. Its not that people have no idea what's happening. They just don't care to do something themselves - there's enough other people to fix it. Its like an email with lots of recipients, no one feels responsible to reply. > But feel free to support them. I never said I support them. I said we could easily get rid of them, of we only wanted to. The problem is (half of) the people around you, not the elites put in power by them.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Gerrymandering can give a great deal of power to ~26% of the population. It takes just over 1/2 the seats in a congress to control legislation, and ~1/2 the voters in those locations. 1/2 * ~1/2 ~= 1/4 The US senate is even more extreme. Wyoming at 578,759 people has exactly as much power as California with 39,512,223. Clearly a party aiming to minimize the number of voters it needs to please would avoid California. After all if you get the right 10% of voters you win and who cares about anything else.
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
It's unfortunate you are being downvoted because you have a lot valid points. > If we are to survive climate change we would have to cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders. They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. I agree this is the inevitable end of this trajectory. Eventually there will be environmental extreme groups that will target fossil fuel leaders. Controversially, ignoring the ethical aspects of this, it would be an incentives equalizer to precipitate real climate regulation. Currently there is no incentive to do so, this dynamics would change with a palpable fear of immediate injury/death.
- hedgedoops2 5y ago
  Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits through carbon capture / sequestration, and tighten the emissions cap. For 4% of global GDP you could stop/compensate global co2 emissions based on current carbon capture technology's prices per ton of co2 removed. [1] If there were a business case for CCS, the cost would come further down. Currently there is no profit in it. One would need to restrict the allowed methods to safe and scalable ones (like extraction from seawater, not ocean seeding). [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk for prices and methods + https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock.htm https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock... + simplistic back of envelope calculation (assumes cost scales up linearly)
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    Carbon credits are a mechanism by which excessive pollution is supposedly legitimized by other actions. It's a rather nefarious scheme IMHO. We should treat the activities of governments, companies and other organizations in a disaggregated fashion: Pumping out CO_2 and other pollutants into the air should be penalized, and engaging in CO_2-and-methane-sequestering activity (e.g. forestation) should be encouraged, independently of one another.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    > Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits through carbon capture / sequestration, Except companies will go for the cheapest possible solution that “counts” for carbon credits, which is probably entirely fraudulent.
flohofwoe 5y ago
The German public (and especially the Green party) has been against nuclear power not since the Chernobyl TV series (which I think didn't tell anything new to most Germans), but since the original Chernobyl incident in 1986. Chernobyl was most likely the catalyst of why the Greens became so popular in Germany in the first place. And now that they are becoming the most powerful political force, don't expect the German stance towards nuclear power to change in the next few decades. (to be clear, I fully support the decommission of European nuclear plants, Europe is just too small and too densely populated to risk nuclear accidents, or for long term storage of nuclear waste)
- jopsen 5y ago
  > Europe is just too small and too densely populated to risk nuklear accidents. Maybe, if we built new safe reactors it wouldn't be a problem. That said, it's probably faster to go renewable -- so is it too much to ask that Germany doesn't build more cold fired plants?
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    As far as I'm aware, no new coal plants will be built: https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-online/ https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-... Coal seems to be roughly on the same trajectory as nuclear, and since around 2015 on a much sharper decline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
    - pantalaimon 5y ago
      Datteln 4 just started operating last year
      - flohofwoe 5y ago
        And that was the last one, meanwhile 8 other coal power plants had been closed in the same year. Planning and building power plants takes a long time, especially in Germany, where all big construction projects take forever. It's clear that there's gonna be some overlap between old and new plans.
merpnderp 5y ago
The only way to "cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders" is realize that wind and solar can't provide base power at rates people can afford. And if people have to spend too much on electricity, they'll vote in new "politicians and dirty industry leaders", like Germany's (and soon France's) return to coal burning. If we started today with nuclear, we could trivially hit the 1.5C IPCC goal. Hell, we could likely hit it if the world started fracking and moved to wind/natgas plants (like the US is doing rapidly). But at least for now, nuclear and fracking are less preferable than >2C warming to nearly all climate change advocates.
- chasd00 5y ago
  I wish someone would do to the energy industry what SpaceX did to the space industry. Prove to the world what is now possible instead of excuse after excuse of defending the status quo.
  - rndmize 5y ago
    Arguably Tesla is doing exactly that. Solar is cheap and available these days, wind is growing consistently. The main issue is smoothing out the spikiness of these sources as they scale to significant parts of the grid. Tesla is the only company I hear about in a real "boots on the ground" kind of way, with notable projects deployed in recent years and a consistent effort to scale those projects up - everything else I've seen is in development, barely started, or vaporware.
- antisthenes 5y ago
  > If we started today with nuclear, we could trivially hit the 1.5C IPCC goal. Just wanted to point out that this is nonsense. We already have 2C of warming baked in, if we go to net zero today, which is a complete fantasy. In fact we're likely to reach 1.5C of warming before those nuclear plants (that you propose we get started on) even come online. Did you even look at the graph in the top post in the thread?
pantalaimon 5y ago
Germany is also the worlds largest lignite miner and won't shut down it's coal plants before 2038.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Shutting down all coal plants before 2038 isn't the same thing as running them until 2038.
fennecfoxen 5y ago
> cull all politicians and dirty industry leaders Hello. Would it be possible to have a conversation about climate change that does not involve the suggestion that humans be killed en masse, in the manner of diseased animals? Thank you.
- s21n 5y ago
  Why not? “If you truly claim to represent the people of the future, Frank asks — people who have the exact same right to a livable planet that we do — doesn’t that mean you should be willing to kill in their defense? Not as a first choice, not as the only choice — but can you really take it off the table? ‘If your organization represents the people who will be born after us, well, that’s a heavy burden! It’s a real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have to do what they would do if they were here,’ Frank argues. ‘I don’t think they would countenance murder,’ retorts Mary, to which Frank replies, ‘Of course they would!’ The Ministry for the Future is thus a novel about bureaucracy, but it’s also about the possibility of a wide diversity of tactics in the name of a livable future that include fighting both inside and outside the system. Characters in the novel contemplate targeted assassination of politicians and CEOs, industrial sabotage of coal plants, intentionally bringing down airliners in the name of destroying commercial air travel, bioterrorism against industrial slaughterhouses — and they do more than contemplate them. How does it change what’s possible when we stop worrying so much about losing in the right way, and start thinking about winning in the wrong ways?” [1] To be honest, I'm surprised we're not seeing more acts of eco-terrorism yet. There are only isolated incidents of infrastructure sabotage. [2] I think it will change if (when) we don't meet the 2030 emission targets. 1. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/of-course-they-would-on-kim-stanley-robinsons-the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/of-course-they-would-on-... 2. https://theintercept.com/2019/10/04/dakota-access-pipeline-sabotage/ https://theintercept.com/2019/10/04/dakota-access-pipeline-s...
  - splithalf 5y ago
    “surprised we're not seeing more acts of eco-terrorism yet“ People don’t work the way you think they do, yet.
  - 5y ago
api 5y ago
The politicians do what corporations and voters want or they get replaced by politicians who will. Corporations want profit. People want jobs and products.
fredm-de 5y ago
The trigger for the decision was not the recent Chernobyl series but the Fukushima incident combined with an important election. If Fukushima would have happened a month later, Germany probably wouldn't have decided to shut down it's unclear power plants. On October 28th 2010 the German government (CDU & FPD) voted to prolong the usage of its existing power plants for another 8 years. Fukushima happened on March 11th 2011. Put under pressure by an increasing poll numbers of the (anti-nuclear) Green Party and having a state election upcoming on March 27th the same government decided to close down the power plants.
- hnbad 5y ago
  Well, the German Greens (along with NGOs like Greenpeace) have always campaigned against nuclear in a way that very effectively shaped public opinion to allow Merkel to use the Fukushima scare as an opportunity to shut down nuclear power. Note that Germany's newest nuclear power plants were built in 1982, before the Chernobyl incident and before the merger of the West German Greens with the East German progressive movement (which made the party more politically relevant). This resulted in lifetimes of existing nuclear plants continuously being extended, which in terms of safety was much worse than building new ones. There are six plants currently still operating, half of which are scheduled to be shut down by the end of this year, the other half scheduled to be shut down by the end of next year. Ironically, the nuclear scares have not resulted in a massive expansion of renewables but in a strengthening of fossil fuels and especially coal (which is heavily subsidized and has even led to land being expropriated "in the common interest" to allow energy companies to harvest lignite). As of 2018 Germany has vague goals about abolishing coal power by 2038 due to public pressure but in the most optimistic scenarios this doesn't involve shutting down any coal plants before 2035. That this is being discussed by (conservative and centrist) government officials at all is only the result of the Fridays For Future protests and related spillover movements (XR and more specifically "Ende Gelände", a series of protests directly targeting the surface mining sites).
- the-dude 5y ago
  > shut down it's unclear power plants. Now that is a typo if I ever saw one.
legulere 5y ago
Germany manages to reduce fossil fuel use though: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei%3AEnergiemix_Deutschland.svg https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei%3AEn... (Personally I would have preferred to shut down coal first, but old nuclear plants are a risk and new ones are too expensive)

TheGigaChad 5y ago

Is this why we still use whale fat? Idiot.

spodek 5y ago

Exactly. Tragically, people think individual action doesn't achieve anything, but they measure the wrong thing, that one person's impact on one or two actions. Our greatest impact is in leading others, which multiplies. To lead others we must first lead ourselves. My personal actions have led me to consult corporate executives, mayors, congressmembers, and other influential people. From the article: > not yet investing at sufficient scale in technologies that support fast decarbonisation of their economies The most effective "technology" is to consume less. What will do that is acting on different values, instead of growth, enjoying what we have, instead of efficiency, resilience, instead of comfort and convenience, meaning, purpose, and the satisfaction of a job well done. Human societies lived with those values for hundreds of thousands of years in some cases, and centuries in many others, with higher markers of health, longevity, stability, and equality than our culture until very recently, but those markers are going back down. And will drop precipitously if we don't return to those values. Population growth may be leveling off in the most polluting nations, but it's globally growing and over sustainable levels. Economically we can sustain population decreasing and many nations have lowered birth rates with the opposite of the One Child Policy coercion or eugenics, purely voluntary, noncoercive, leading to stability, health, and abundance. > “Every day, we witness the worsening consequences of the climate crisis for communities around the world – farmers’ crops failing; floods and fires engulfing towns and villages; families facing an uncertain future." We can dance around sustainability issues all we want, we eventually reach both overpopulation and overconsumption, both driven by growth, both driven by cultural beliefs and values we can change. This community loves nuclear, but without considering your point, that we aren't using new energies to replace but to augment. If we ever expect to stop growing and instead shrinking our polluting behavior, the sooner the better, as in now, which requires leadership more like Churchill, Mandela, MLK, and peers, not new technology. It costs nothing and improves our lives. When we learn to reduce consumption, nuclear will help. With our current values, we'll keep growing until hitting its limits, back where we are now, but with more people and dependency, making reduction harder. To quantify all this, I recommend Tom Murphy's book Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, which I wrote about https://joshuaspodek.com/the-science-book-of-the-decade-energy-and-human-ambitions-on-a-finite-planet-by-tom-murphy https://joshuaspodek.com/the-science-book-of-the-decade-ener....

tjbiddle 5y ago

Interesting. Looking at the same graph - especially when you tweak it to show only the last decade - you'll see solar is growing very quickly (25% YoY) while the others stay fairly stable. That would have it overtaking oil in 20 years. Considering we're going to see mass adoption of electric vehicles in the next 5-20 years I think that will happen even more quickly.

Aicy 5y ago
Only if you assume that the growth is expoential / compounding. I don't know much about the field, but given the vast investments and land needed for country level solar projects I would argue the growth rate is much more likely to be linear, in which case it looks like it won't be overtaking oil this century. It's relatively easy to make large percentage gains when the current amount is so small.
- gregwebs 5y ago
  Solar already hit a supply shock this year that has increased the cost of installation (it has been reliably going down before this). Solar growth is expected to be closer to just linear this year. I hope this is temporary due to all the supply shocks going on right now. Looking longer-term there will be growth slow-down when wind/solar reaches a larger scale due to the intermittent nature of the energy unless we can figure out how to deal with this. Currently dealing with it requires lots of gas peaker plants, hydro (which has its own environmental damages) or batteries (the resources required to produce and continually replace these are not sustainable but hopefully the net carbon emission can stay low). Malaysia recently had to stop incentivizing solar because their grid couldn't handle it.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    There was a similar price shock back around 2010 (?) due to polysilicon shortage. After the hand wringing about how the learning curve was over, capacity increased, and prices continued downward, making up for lost time.
gregwebs 5y ago

globular-toast 5y ago

Humans never willingly decrease their footprint. Even technology that is supposed to "save money" won't be used to decrease overall footprint. People want to save money so they can get more in other areas. Technology that simply reduces overall footprint doesn't sell. Technology will not save us.

chess_buster 5y ago
Counter point: In Germany we are moving from heating generated from coal and oil to heat generated by heat pumps.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Which is largely driven by government regulation. This is not people doing it willingly just for the sake of reducing consumption. Governments have the power to do things like this. But even then, it remains to be seen if this will actually reduce overall energy usage. It could simply mean people keep their houses warmer/cooler all year round and energy usage stays the same. Or the "saved" energy merely gets diverted to some other use.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Yes, leaving fossil fuels in the ground will be because governments stop people from using them. This will involve laws and guns.

einpoklum 5y ago

> Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with a new one. Instead total energy usage grows. Our only success with fossil fuel usage reduction is that coal usage is no longer growing. That is a misrepresentation. The fact that a bunch of other people in another country use, say, more biomass now than in the past since there are more of them than in the past, does not mean that in your country there hasn't been a displacement of biomass with, say, coal. And indeed, coal had displaced biomass in many countries in the world. And natural gas displaced coal in some places.

gregwebs 5y ago
I agree with your statement. However, we need to keep in mind that displacing an energy supply in one country keeps the resource available and the price lower so that another country may use more of it. We may have real success with reducing coal usage soon since it is much less economically viable to transport it long distances. We need to also keep in mind where energy is being used the most now and in the future. In the long-term Europe going 100% renewable by itself doesn't change the global energy picture much. The greater effect is the leading role they play demonstrating how it can be done and further developing renewable technology.

ashtonkem 5y ago

Counterpoint, while it’s true we still use things like coal, what we do with them has changed massively. Coal in the 1850s was all about metal working, steam production (train and ship), and home heating, uses that have been almost entirely replaced. Coal fired power plants came surprisingly later, with most units coming online in America between 1910 and 1950, a time in which trains and ships largely went electric or to diesel. Also, our history of energy production is very short. I’d be disinclined to say that it’s impossible based on a mere 200 year sample.

gregwebs 5y ago
That's not a counterpoint, it is a case in point! There are some energy sources like whale oil that had supply issues and roughly a single use that got displaced. But for our major energy sources with a vast supply we keep finding ways to use them in amounts that don't really decrease.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It's kind of a counterpoint still. We tried and managed to replace coal for home heating and transport with something else, because coal kind of sucks for those things. The fact that coal continued to be used in new ways is a consequence of coal dropping in price and there being no real external pressure to eliminate coal usage. It's not clear what happens once there's strong pressure to eliminate these fuels from our economy, because we've never really tried it before.

analognoise 5y ago

"Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with a new one." I'm having trouble finding whale oil for my vintage lamp...

thehappypm 5y ago

I mean.. in 1800 the main source of power for transportation and industry was wind and water. In 1850 it was coal.

Workaccount2 5y ago
Because fossil fuels are the best energy source, absolutely smashing the competition circa 1850 and still the top contender today. If we found a comparable energy source today that checked all the same boxes as fossil fuels, sans climate change and plus energy density, we'd be all over it tomorrow.
gregwebs 5y ago
But the energy usage increased dramatically. So it is possible that the usage of wind power and water power never declined much (it would be interesting to see data for this). A clearer case might be something like using animal power (for plowing and transportation) but I think this idea only applies to resources that have a ready and easy to expand supply.

boringg 5y ago

Displacing fossil fuel for mobility with green hydrogen + electricity will reduce a large portion of those energy sources. Hydrogen for heating + for shipping + heavy duty transit -- more. California has already decoupled increasing amounts of electricity use and emissions through a combination of policies to increase adoption of renewables and through codes and standards for home heating/insulation/good build practices. So while your statement may resonate with some of the past - it does not handcuff us to a future trajectory. It is possible to change and it is happening - it just needs to happen faster and increase in its scale. Also - we did stop using whale oil in the early 1900s so your statement is not 100%.

gregwebs 5y ago
Whales were going to go extinct so I don’t think there was much choice. Also it had just one main use at the time for oil lamps. That can certainly be disrupted. But if it was a plentiful source it may have been possible to figure out how to use it more broadly. I agree that history is not destiny. But in this case only if we first understand history.
- FooHentai 5y ago
  Random aside, the fantasy world in the Dishonoured games series is a parallel version to ours wherein whale oil formed the basis for the industrial revolution. This is I think a riff on the Fallout universe, where the transistor was never invented and electronics still bloomed via it's predecessor, vacuum tube technology.

sandworm101 5y ago

>> Humanity has never displaced an existing energy source with a new one. Instead total energy usage grows. Which is why any efforts based on reducing energy use are doomed to fail. "Do more with less" sounds great but goes against human nature to expand and collect resources. The push should always be to make energy cheaper or more green, not to curtail energy use. An effort to power air conditioners using solar: good, people will get behind that. More efficient air conditioners that use less power: great. Telling people they must reduce air conditioning and just live in hot: bad, doomed to fail. So bring on the solar panels. The mob will support you. Just don't tell that mob they must do with less.

gregwebs 5y ago
Actually I suspect we need both approaches. But I agree we need to both support economic needs and make it not feel like extra work to use less energy (although there may be some extra up front costs).
N1H1L 5y ago
Total energy usage has stopped growing for most of the developed world for the past decade.

EcoMonkey 5y ago

This is a primary reason that we need a carbon tax. Building out renewables and stopping there will just make energy cheaper and induce demand. A carbon tax will actually change the energy mix by making carbon-intensive energy sources more expensive relative to less carbon-intensive sources. Speaking of visual reality checks, check out En-ROADS, which was built in collaboration with MIT to simulate different policy interventions. Check out the carbon price slider compared to everything else: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7.39 https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7.... My favorite thing to do with the money from a carbon tax is to just give it back to everyone as equal dividends, to offset any regressive effects of the carbon tax without creating tons of loopholes with another more complex disbursement scheme. This is called carbon fee and dividend. The IPCC finds with high confidence that we need a high price on carbon to stay under 1.5C. PDF warning: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15_Chapter2_Low_Res.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15... A policy framework without a carbon tax is not serious about getting emissions down.

asdff 5y ago

Nixon wanted to have 1000 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. by the year 2000. Today there are 60. Would this law have still applied if we followed up with our planned nuclear infrastructure?

gregwebs 5y ago
If we presume that the entire US became gradually powered by nuclear (along with solar, wind, and hydro), we probably wouldn't have ever seen an actual global decline in fossil fuel usage at any point other than perhaps coal by a little. Total fossil fuel usage today would be lower though, but this would make oil cheaper for the rest of the world which would lead to greater oil consumption in the rest of the world than what we have historically had. The US would also need to lead the rest of the world to adopt nuclear as well.

defaultname 5y ago

I'm not sure if this is a "reality check", and it sounds suspiciously similar to the "population explosion" claims. US electricity and gasoline consumption has declined since 2010, despite a growing GDP and almost 20 million more people. Efficiency and conservation have achieved enormous gains, and every renewable source that comes online displaces an existing one. This has occurred across every developed nation. Japan is using 20% less energy today than it did in 2000. Germany, France, Italy, Canada -- all below 2000. As developing countries bring more of their population into more modern accouterments, of course the total is increasing -- for now -- but thankfully most are starting with a much greater mix of reasonable sources.

gregwebs 5y ago
I agree that Europe is having real success. But we need to also keep in mind where energy is being used the most now and in the future. In the long-term Europe going 100% renewable by itself doesn't change the global energy picture much. Displacing a global energy supply in one country keeps the resource available and the price lower so that another country may use more of it. We may have actual success with reducing global coal usage soon since it does not transport easily. I can't find data to back up your claims about the US decreasing electricity and gasoline consumption. Do you mean per capita? Meanwhile natural gas consumption is increasing. I also suspect that the US has outsourced much of our energy usage to China in the form of manufacturing. China now uses much more energy that the US (although not per capita). Developing countries may have a head start with renewables now, but AFAIK their overall energy usage still implies increased fossil fuel usage for the world. I don't believe this means we are in a hopeless situation. I think it means that Europe and the US must prioritize using their wealth to further develop the technology for carbon neutral energy and to demonstrate it so that it becomes the default energy source for the entire world.
- defaultname 5y ago
  No, I mean in total. US energy consumption across the board has declined. Even in total energy consumption (every plane, train, automobile, factory, office, microwave, etc) the US is currently about equal with 2000. I mean, it was equal before COVID hit, and is measurably lower now (which will likely continue as fewer people commute) 21 years later, with an improving quality of life, and almost 50 million extra people (almost 20% more), aggregate energy use for the entire nation is static and declining. There remain enormous opportunities for efficiency, a lot of it simply in normal ongoing modernization. Wind and solar are already cheaper than any other source but natural gas, which itself is a precarious source that most nations aren't in a geopolitical situation to rely upon. I find it odd that you question my facts given that there is literally nothing that claims otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

stragio 5y ago

Why it's going to be hard to go for green energy: https://braveneweurope.com/alf-hornborg-a-globalised-solar-powered-future-is-wholly-unrealistic-and-our-economy-is-the-reason-why https://braveneweurope.com/alf-hornborg-a-globalised-solar-p...

andy_ppp 5y ago

I guess the graph ends somewhere and my guess is we largely stop using energy during the coming nuclear winter.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Of course they can't. Nuclear is about the only viable way currently, but "greenies" won't have that. I think eventually they'll have to accept it as well the climate skeptics. I certainly hope solar comes up from the rear and surprises me, but unless we have a 100x breakthrough in energy storage (batteries or something more exotic) I don't see it happening. I guess a break through in solar->biofuel energy conversion might also be sufficient for it to replace fossil fuels completely.