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> The life-cycle carbon cost of renewables isn't a fact about renewables. It's a fact about our current energy production mix, which renewables themselves will

> The life-cycle carbon cost of renewables isn't a fact about renewables. It's a fact about our current energy production mix, which renewables themselves will change over time. Sure but we are talking about right now. Things will eventually be swapped out. That's a different conversation though, it's an advocacy and not a descriptive one. People tend to use things that are marginally adequate way longer than anyone intended. For instance, the ancient Roman gravity dam of Proserpina is still doing its job. Even if we had say a sleek $1,000 self driving solar car that never needs charging and goes for a million miles without maintenance, there's no guaranteed adoption curve, production capacity, distribution and logistic timeline, consumer acceptance, these are all hard unknown realities regardless of how silvery the bullets are.

Robotbeat 5y ago
It IS relevant right now. If the "lifecycle emissions" of near-term renewables is used to argue against deploying them and instead using existing carbon-emitting sources, then you've delayed progress and made things impossible to resolve except by basically shutting down everything (which would kill people and is politically infeasible). Decarbonization compounds. That means that "lifecycle emissions" analysis can end up being too pessimistic if you consider changes made in a vacuum. Electric cars require steel and electricity to make, so considered by themselves (while still definitely worth it) don't look as good as they do when you consider we will need to be decarbonizing steel and electricity as well. Power plants need vehicles and steel as well, so decarbonizing transport and steel also reduces the lifecycle emissions of power plants! I think people resist this type of thinking because of a different kind of magical thinking: a sort of anti-silver-bullet magic. They have the idea of fossil fuels as fundamental to civilization, like we can't actually get rid of them. But this isn't true. We can eliminate fossil fuel usage just fine. We should consider fossil fuel as the seed corn. Instead of feeling bad that it takes fossil fuels to do the initial manufacture of geothermal (or whatever), consider it as simply priming the pump, as seed corn. There is no better use for fossil fuels than assisting in manufacturing their total replacements.

Robotbeat 5y ago

It IS relevant right now. If the "lifecycle emissions" of near-term renewables is used to argue against deploying them and instead using existing carbon-emitting sources, then you've delayed progress and made things impossible to resolve except by basically shutting down everything (which would kill people and is politically infeasible). Decarbonization compounds. That means that "lifecycle emissions" analysis can end up being too pessimistic if you consider changes made in a vacuum. Electric cars require steel and electricity to make, so considered by themselves (while still definitely worth it) don't look as good as they do when you consider we will need to be decarbonizing steel and electricity as well. Power plants need vehicles and steel as well, so decarbonizing transport and steel also reduces the lifecycle emissions of power plants! I think people resist this type of thinking because of a different kind of magical thinking: a sort of anti-silver-bullet magic. They have the idea of fossil fuels as fundamental to civilization, like we can't actually get rid of them. But this isn't true. We can eliminate fossil fuel usage just fine. We should consider fossil fuel as the seed corn. Instead of feeling bad that it takes fossil fuels to do the initial manufacture of geothermal (or whatever), consider it as simply priming the pump, as seed corn. There is no better use for fossil fuels than assisting in manufacturing their total replacements.