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The follow-up to this article would discuss the effects of falling costs on accelerating the transition. Massive battery installations plus solar are already c

• jfoutz 5y ago
  Deep down, I think we're pretty much all fucked. We've gone too far and there's no way back. And I think you agree. But, hey, there is a glimmer of hope. It's not going to do a damn thing, but cycling instead of driving is still a bit of defiance, even if it's only symbolic. Realistically, we do have power and control over where and how we work. There is some real muscle in smart people working on hard problems. May not a win. I'm sure you understand the consequences of that. At least, I can go down swinging. As you say, things are going into overdrive. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. I am going to encourage you to hold off on that heroin experiment for a while, maybe don't move to a tent in a national park just yet. Things are changing. We don't get a free pass. Some things are going to be real ugly. Maybe, MAYBE, things will be ok. The iceberg is out there. We're probably going to hit it. We all still have some agency (I hope). If you have to rearrange deck chairs, go for it. Give it a minute. We aren't sunk yet. It doesn't have to be an apocolypse just yet.
  • adflux 5y ago
    You know whats worse than people who say climate change doesnt exist? People like you who spout off unsubstantiated defeatist nonsense about "why it's too late" and "it doesn't matter". Because people like you trick others into thinking the same, and not giving a damn.
    • cassepipe 5y ago
      I don't feel tricked into not caring when threatened with living on a barely livable planet. I don't know if he or she is right but if anything, when I read it, it rather made me think about what would ecological armed struggle against the biggest polluters would look like.
      • Chris2048 5y ago
        If the biggest polluters petrol/oil, then you'll be fighting people with working vehicles.
    • afarrell 5y ago
      Agreed. We live in a world with many grave challenges—and yet the correct response is still hope.
      • chinathrow 5y ago
        No, the correct response is action.
        • 0_____0 5y ago
          not mutually exclusive
        • afarrell 5y ago
          True, yet Action is impossible to coordinate without hope.
    • snek_case 5y ago
      There's a lot of pessimism and cynicism in the world these days. I think movies make that clear. There are so many movies about dystopian futures where everything is hopeless and everything is inevitably going to shit. The general mood is very different from what you saw in movies from the 1980s. Personally, I think that any action we can take towards making things better will pay off. Action is better than inaction. There will be negative consequences to climate change, but acting sooner could save millions, even hundreds of millions of lives, so don't give up now. We're just finally starting to see real adoption of electric cars and grid-scale batteries, those industries are set to boom. The solution is at our doorstep, now is not the time to just go "ah, fuck it, why bother?".
  • kortilla 5y ago
    What a boring anti-science trope. At least the anti-science denialists aren’t so negative.
  • PedroBatista 5y ago
    Since you’re unsurprisingly taking a beating here in HN, let me reframe your general mood. The planet is and will be fine, it’s our way of living and society that will go, and that will not happen in your lifetime. So there’s no need for you to suffer with that gloom. Another even more practical reason: it’s unproductive. Most of that anxiety is offloaded from those in true power and resold by “the media”. It’s obviously a serious problem but they are feeding you mostly bullshit in order to meet their revenue targets or agendas. Don’t be a victim of them before being a victim of climate change.
    • sofixa 5y ago
      > The planet is and will be fine, You can't know that. Rising temperatures, acidity and water levels in oceans, deforestation, overfishing, drastic temperature amplitudes and higher frequency of natural disasters can all be devastating for whole ecosystems, which could have cascading effects. Nobody can reliably predict how all of that will turn out, but it could turn out really bad. Will the planet "be fine" if a big portion of ocean life is extinct and huge swaths of land are uninhabitable? Depends on your definition of fine i guess.
      • PedroBatista 5y ago
        Huge amounts of life and species have died out in the past and will continue to happen. This time we have an hand in it, but you don't see any other species aware or preoccupied by it, so it's also morality issue. My response was in order to address this generalized anxiety and guilt that's mostly unproductive and in some cases quite maquiavelic. So yes, "the planet" will be fine. Our coddled asses attached to our infantilized minds probably not, so instead of this schizophrenic attitude ranging from "We're doomed!" to "I want to talk to the manager", maybe we should be more productive and do our best while understanding we might not get what we want and that's "fine".
      • bregma 5y ago
        The ecosphere has been around for billions of years. It's been through much much, MUCH worse. It'll be fine. Maybe some hairless apes might suffer a bit, and a few thousand species might be replaced by something else, but in the long run the planet is going to thrive.
  • thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
    To put things in perspective We've already warmed up the planet by about 1C from pre-industrial times, and...well, pretty much nothing consequential happened Based on the most likely temperature impacts of the most realistic emission scenarios, we're looking at an additional 0.8C (optimistic) to 1.5C (pessimistic) on top of that by the end of the century, with the temperatures plateauing shortly afterwards. No, Earth will not become the next Venus, nor will Greenland and Antarctic melt (it's -30C there right now)
    • adrianN 5y ago
      You assume linear relationships between temperature and "bad things happening", but the climate system is not linear at all.
    • dTal 5y ago
      Greenland is literally melting. Google it.
    • taneq 5y ago
      looks around Yep, yeah, nothing consequential happening around the world. No widespread unprecedented flash floods in multiple areas of the globe simultaneously. No megafires burning on multiple continents. No temperature records being broken and re-broken by wide margins multiple times a year every single year. Nothing really at all. I don't know what they're talking about. ...is "Greenland and the Antarctic are still cold" really your hot take on climate change?
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  There was a recent paper that discussed this and said the transition is now inevitable due to economics and maybe always has been, but lots of forecasts were linear in their assumptions. https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy_transition_paper-INET-working-paper.pdf https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy_transition_paper-INET... > Rapidly decarbonising the global energy system is critical for addressing climate change, but concerns about costs have been a barrier to implementation. Most energy-economy models have historically underestimated deployment rates for renewable energy tech- nologies and overestimated their costs1,2,3,4,5,6. The problems with these models have stimulated calls for better approaches7,8,9,10,11,12 and recent e↵orts have made progress in this direction13,14,15,16. Here we take a new approach based on probabilistic cost fore- casting methods that made reliable predictions when they were empirically tested on more than 50 technologies17,18. We use these methods to estimate future energy system costs and find that, compared to continuing with a fossil-fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition will likely result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars - even without accounting for climate damages or co-benefits of climate policy. We show that if solar photovoltaics, wind, batteries and hydrogen electrolyzers continue to follow their current exponentially increasing deployment trends for another decade, we achieve a near-net-zero emissions energy system within twenty-five years. In contrast, a slower transition (which involves deployment growth trends that are lower than current rates) is more expensive and a nuclear driven transition is far more expensive. If non-energy sources of carbon emissions such as agriculture are brought under control, our analysis indicates that a rapid green energy transition would likely generate considerable eco- nomic savings while also meeting the 1.5 degrees Paris Agreement target.
  • xbmcuser 5y ago
    This is something a lot smart people even here on hackernews have been unable to get their head around. The speed of cost decrease in renewable based electricity and battery prices. Solar electricity is cheaper now than all fossil fuel based electricity in most of the world already. But its cost are still decreasing at about 10% a year. So electricity that costs $1 today will cost $0.25 or less in 10 years. Most of us have not seen this on our bills yet as renewable still are small percentage of the total as the percentage of renewable increases our bills should start decreasing as well. Currently Electric cars you can drive 18 miles compared ice cars 10 miles for a $1. It could be 40 miles in 5 years and 80 miles a $1 in 10. Without even any improvements in the electric car motors and lighter batteries which could push the mileage to 100~120 miles a $1. This is the reason I feel electric vehicles will be supply constrained rather than demand constrained in the next few years. And if current manufacturers are unwilling to sacrifice their ice vehicle cash cows now they will loose the market to the new entrants very very quickly. And with electric cars being less complex to manufacture we might see manufacturers outside of Japan, Eur and USA.
• nl 5y ago
  Worth noting that people misunderstand baseline (baseload) requirements too. Solar+batteries and some pump storage and wind are very nearly statistically able to meet baseload in most places. Small gas plants might be needed to fill the gap for a period of time but there's no gap for large scale non renewable power sources (coal, oil, nuclear or large gas) that's big enough to make economic sense.
  • sofixa 5y ago
    > Solar+batteries and some pump storage and wind are very nearly statistically able to meet baseload in most places Most places? As I've mentioned a few times here, there's an ongoing meteorological phenomenon across Europe with bad weather ( clouds and stuff), low wind speeds and cold temperatures. It started around September and is projected to continue well into the winter. Electricity produced by wind is at historical lows, and of course solar is of limited help as well. It's among the contributing factors for the high gas prices. You'd need a whole lot of batteries and pumped up hydro ( which can't just be put anywhere) to cover for such events.
    • jimmydorry 5y ago
      Not to mention a daily phenomena where demand increases while sunlight decreases, the impact increases or decreases by time of year.
    • vardump 5y ago
      Why can't we just have cross-continent UHVDC cables to counteract that issue?
      • sofixa 5y ago
        Because shit happens and there's resistance ( electrical). There are cables between the UK and France, and UK and Norway, and there was a fire at one of the UK-France cables, rendering it inoperable for months. And depending on faraway places for energy is dangerous, as for instance Germany is discovering now with Russia. Do you imagine Europe depending on Algeria and Morocco solar, for instance, and France pissing them off with some (neo/ex-)colonial matters ( like for instance, France recently lowered quotas for Algerian citizens entering the country, and Algeria was (rightfully) pissed), and them cutting the cables.
• sofixa 5y ago
  > Massive battery installations plus solar are already cheaper than operating an existing natural gas peaker plant in California Aren't natural gas prices pretty high currently ? And with many countries moving away from gas in their electricity production, or at least moving it to peak-only, the price will go down. Furthermore, batteries with what capacity? I highly doubt they're of the size required to sustain multi-week storm/bad weather events, even for the rarity they'd be in sunny California, le alone the rest of the US. And from a globally strategic point of view, isn't it better to focus battery capacity on decarbonising sectors such as transportation ( cars, trucks, even trains apparently ( i still think electrifying the network is a better idea overall, but i can see how it'd be cheaper upfront to just add a battery car)) instead of "wasting" TWhs of battery capacity for long term storage.
  • tailsdog 5y ago
    > And with many countries moving away from gas in their electricity production, or at least moving it to peak-only, the price will go down. If there is less consumption I would imagine the price would rather go up.
    • irrational 5y ago
      This was my thought too. I hope OP responds with why they think lessened demand would lead to lower prices. That doesn’t make any sense.
      • ovi256 5y ago
        It's a consequence of a demand curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_curve, an established concept in economics
        • nindalf 5y ago
          It’s unclear to me if that accounts for second order effects? For example, lower demand leads to lower prices, sure. But then those lower prices lead to higher demand. This should quickly reach equilibrium if buying and selling were spur of the moment decisions with no long term consequence. But in the energy market that’s not the case. Building a power plant is a commitment to buying that product, which locks in that demand regardless of price. And so continued low prices could lead to more construction of gas plants, which leads to an increase in demand. Basically what I’m saying is that the demand curve models a simple market with a fungible good, which can be bought and sold easily. We have to recognise that it’s like studying spherical, frictionless projectiles in physics. A good starting point, but not how the real world works.
• throwaway894345 5y ago
  I know nothing, but what stops us from just using more energy overall such that we still depend on large amounts of fossil fuel? Even if we bring on more solace, how do we know it will replace fossil fuel rather than enabling more iverall consumption?
  • christophilus 5y ago
    This is my expectation. In absolute terms, we burn more coal and biomass than ever. We’ve never reduced (in absolute terms) the amount of an energy source we consume. Replacements have served to aid an increase in over all energy consumption. Source: a podcast, so no idea if it checks out.
    • bcrosby95 5y ago
      USA electricity use over the past 20 years has been flat. In general, people aren't sitting around wishing they had more electricity. If they wanted to use more it's right there and available.
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        There are quite a few billion people around the world who are wishing they had more electricity aspiring to USA living standards who will pick up the slack in demand.
        • toomuchtodo 5y ago
          They will leapfrog fossil fuels though and go straight to renewables, micro grids, battery storage, etc.
          • lotsofpulp 5y ago
            Ideally, but even in the US, I feel like any reduction in fossil fuel prices will be offset by increased usage such as purchase of bigger cars or flying more as history has shown.
• gwright 5y ago
  I would be interested in seeing a detailed analysis that came to the same conclusion as your assertion regarding solar+storage being cheaper than gas plant in California. Here is a pretty detailed analysis indicating that the storage costs make that combination infeasible at this point: http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries-included/ http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries... The California scenario in that report suggests over $5 trillion needed to switch to solar+batteries.
  • xbmcuser 5y ago
    That report is already too old to be relevant. It took battery prices at $200 they are around $100-120 now it took solar cost at around $50 per MWH it is now around $35~40 in the US $20~30 in India and China etc. And prices for both are still falling approximately 10~15% annually.
    • gwright 5y ago
      So only $2.5 trillion? I get the fact that battery prices are going down. That doesn't mean that grid-scale battery systems are feasible and deployable any time soon.
• zionic 5y ago
  People talk a lot about a lot of things when it comes to energy production, but in terms of what actually happens the largest factor is $/MW in terms of new capacity in the expected timeframe. That economic force dominates all. As a provider I (they) want x GW of new capacity, and will chose whatever costs the lowest amount to get that capacity. Solar is getting so cheap now that overbuilding is an entirely viable option. This is why renewables are getting built over new coal plants, the environmental benefits are just a marketing bonus. As Engineers/scientists our job is to innovate and get the costs of the "correct" decision low enough that the economic forces take over and steer humanity towards the best outcome.