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Fossil Fuel Use Increasing, Not Decreasing
- M95D 3y agoThe entire world's economy is based on fossil fuel. If there's even a hint of not growing -> stock markets crash. How could anyone expect a decrease in anything consumed, fossil fuel especially?!
- vouaobrasil 3y agoI am not surprised. As long as we pretend we can still operate a growth economy while "doing something" about climate change, we are going to have a huge problem trying to curb the use of fossil fuels. In the short term, new competing energy sources will lower the demand of fossil fuels and hence the price, so that more will be used to compensate. But even besides the issue of alternative energy sources, we insist on growing our consumerist, capitalistic economy being made more efficient by THE DAY by soulless tech companies like Google, so what do you expect? Countries should re-tool to be more self-sustainable in terms of the basics of food, shelter, and basic products. We should strive to make economies less efficient and more self-sufficient.
- Retric 3y agoThis isn’t about capitalism. Wealthy nations are seeing reductions in total CO2 emissions. US dropped from 6 billion metric tons in 2007 to 5 billion metric tons in 2022. That’s back to 1988 levels despite 40% population growth, increased prosperity, and all those crossovers and giant SUV’s. Including imports and exports changes these numbers slightly, but doesn’t change the overall trend. Developing countries are adopting zero carbon technologies because their cost effective, but they are also ramping up fossil fuel use because they are simply growing so quickly. Ethiopia’s real GDP growth rate is 6.1%/year and that’s a good thing in almost every context except pollution.
- vouaobrasil 3y agoThe accounting for CO2 emissions is a bit lopsided. Why do you think developing nations are developing so quickly to become more like the US? The only reason is because they are aided through technologies developed by first-world countries in the first place, the reasons for which are primarily consumerist. If all first-world countries stopped producing so many things to consume and returned to simpler lifestyles, then there would be much less "development" in developing nations.
- Retric 3y ago> all first-world countries stopped producing so many things to consume and returned to simpler lifestyles, then there would be much less "development" in developing nations. When you say simpler lifestyles you mean higher infant mortality, poor sanitation, dirt roads, and all those other ills from poverty. Yes people living in the tropics also want AC, so do we. This isn’t about people in Bangladesh/US wanting an iPhone or designer clothing. Electronics barely move the CO2 needle, it’s things we take for granted like clean drinking water that takes massive infrastructure and tons of concrete.
- martin_drapeau 3y agoGood point. People often forget that the quality of life we have today comes from energy consumption and technological innovation. It all started with fire...
- vouaobrasil 3y agoI disagree. I mean less consumption of non-essential things like upgrades to smartphones every year, keeping 3G as opposed to 4G, 5G, no AI use, no plastic packaging, slower but functional internet, no imports of cheap things from China, no social media, etc. In other words: the reduction of mostly useless technologies on a voluntary basis. Less imported food instead of home-grown food, less imported clothes, less new things that replace perfectly good old things...
- Retric 3y ago
- Qem 3y ago> Wealthy nations are seeing reductions in total CO2 emissions. US dropped from 6 billion metric tons in 2007 to 5 billion metric tons in 2022. Probably mostly outsourcing manufacture and associated pollution elsewhere (e.g. China).
- Retric 3y agoNope, if anything imports are flat over that timeframe: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/imports https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/impo... (In constant 2021 dollars that’s 3,129B in 2007 vs 3,401B in 2021.) https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ Really we’re talking a 17% drop in CO2 emissions it would take quite a lot to offset it.
- bmitc 3y ago> This isn't about capitalism. How is unconstrained growth at all costs not part of this? > Wealthy nations are seeing reductions in total CO2 emissions Because they are off shored, are they not? And developing countries are increasingly using fossil fuels because of their adoption of capitalism and of technologies (i.e., customers) from developed countries, are they not?
- inglor_cz 3y ago"How is unconstrained growth at all costs not part of this?" It may be a part, but it may also be a lazy ideological distraction. For example, here north of the Alps, a significant factor in the total CO2 budget is heating of homes, which cannot be offshored and cannot be simply banned; previous generations had this problem, too, and they cut down most of the primeval forests for the same purpose. (Europe is now significantly more forested than in the 16th century.) Looking back at my childhood in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, our heating was notoriously dirty, burning low-quality coal directly in houses, streets full of stinking smoke. Our centrally planned economy stagnated (degrowth!), so replacing old dirty coal-based equipment with something more modern was economically challenging.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoThis is a little like saying that because blood sugar disregulation can come from T1 diabetes that it can't come from T2 diabetes. Just because a socialist country caused pollution, doesn't mean that capitalism cannot cause pollution for its own reasons.
- inglor_cz 3y agoIt is sort-of a warning for idealists who think that socialism treats nature better. I notice lionization of socialism among young Americans quite often, it is a distant and luring ideal for them, with no personal experience to correct the image. Pretty much the universal experience from east of the Iron Curtain was the opposite. Ecological initiatives were a part of the coalition of the unhappy that brought the regimes down at the end of the eighties.
- specialist 3y agoYup. For instance, China's demand for new energy means they're building more of everything. More nukes, solar, wind, AND coal. Solar is the cheapest option, and getting cheaper. Installed capacity is doubling every 20 (?) months. China is adding more solar every year than the rest of the world combined. But it's still not enough. Therefore, China is compelled to add more coal too. This (pathetic) NYT article explains none of that.
- rgmerk 3y agoThe IEA predicts that energy-related CO2 emissions will peak in 2025. My guess is that a fair chunk of the predicted extraction by 2030 will never happen.
- snoshy 3y agoThe IEA has done a pretty terrible job of predicting the mix of energy sources over the recent past, largely being overly biased towards fossil fuels. I honestly wouldn't put a whole lot of stock in their predictions even if their claim is that energy-related CO2 would peak in 2025.
- redprince 3y agoI hope these predictions are somewhat more accurate than their previous projections for solar energy. https://nitter.net/AukeHoekstra/status/1507047932226375688#m https://nitter.net/AukeHoekstra/status/1507047932226375688#m
- sasaf5 3y agoWe are clearly in trouble with climate change, but really our priorites are reenacting WWII and making people see more ads.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- usrusr 3y agoAnd chances are it will only get worse, because the bleaker a rational look at the future gets, the bigger the lure of irrational fantasies and "explanations"
- namaria 3y agoThis is addiction mechanics at play. Like an individual who won't think of changing until hitting rock bottom and even then it's a toss up. Society won't be serious about climate change until disastrous levels are reached. And even then we'll have plenty of actors willing to burn fossil fuels clandestinely. We're in for a rough ride for the next century or so.
- usrusr 3y agoIt's worse than that, because tragedy of commons is at play and those who pretend that the pie will grow forever will get most of whatever crumbs will be left.
- msandford 3y agoI'm guessing it's this at work: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- martin_drapeau 3y agoThroughout human history, energy consumption has increased along with quality of life and number of humans on Earth. Can quality of life improve with less energy consumption and less humans? I'm not too sure...
- flashback2199 3y agoAre fossil fuels the only source of energy?
- martin_drapeau 3y agoAbsolutely not! Hydro, nuclear fission, solar, wind, etc. Tons of other options. My point is you need energy to cook food and have hospitals. Without those basic needs covered, a society can't function. If we want to continue improving our lives, we need more energy.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoDuring my childhood we lit our homes with ridiculous incandescent lights that were powerful enough to fry an egg (a trick my friends and I used to pull off with a floodlight.) Our entertainment came from TVs that used enormous energy-hungry cathode ray tubes. Our home PCs used dozens of times more power than the iPhone I have in my hand, despite being a million times less powerful. Today I drive an electric car that is somewhere between 2-8x more efficient than the gasoline clunkers of my childhood. I could probably go on about heat pumps, but you get the point. At the same time, nearly everything I own or use is nicer and more luxurious than the things I had when I was a kid, even though those things are rose-tinted in my memories. Meanwhile the cost of energy is going down faster than at any time in my entire life. They’re building an 800MW offshore wind plant off my coast, and another 2000MW is scheduled to go in down in Virginia. The per-watt cost of solar is now below most fossil fuels, and continues to plummet each year. None of this is perfect - there are still challenges related to capacity and demand matching - but it’s hard to argue that we’ll be facing some kind of long term society-limiting energy crisis in my lifetime, absent a world war. If anything we’re about to enter a period of absurd energy abundance we don’t yet know what to do with.
- faeriechangling 3y agoAll I hear in contemporary politics is how carbon taxes, already set low enough that they won’t stop increasing fossil fuel use, are too much and must be repealed. This point of view only gets more popular. Let’s repeal the tax and wait for the good times people say. They’re not anti-environment they say, they just want to try unspecified different solutions, so long as it costs them nothing. Once we burn a little more fuel, the good times will be here, and we can lay off a bit. People don’t seem to have the stomach to accept what’s coming even to the extent they’re willing to act together to ensure we all have a better future. I never expected people to do much. Yet I was never this pessimistic.
- ip26 3y agoCarbon taxes need a good story for what happens to the tax revenue. Most of the time, advocates want to siphon the revenue into their pet cause, or pay off private interests. This makes an already bitter pill dead on arrival. I usually figure a simple carbon dividend might be a more effective pitch. If you produce an average amount of carbon, you pay $x in tax and get a refund of $x. If you produce more, you come out negative, and if you produce less you make money on net. So, the clear incentive is to use less than your peers in an eventual race to the bottom. (One risk is poor folks might actually produce more carbon than the middle class, with older vehicles in disrepair and poorly insulated homes) At the end of the day though, consent of the public is what will move the needle. Carbon taxes might be Pareto Efficient and popular with economists, but if the public just hates all new taxes and won’t go for it, it’s right in theory but wrong in practice.
- gs17 3y ago> (One risk is poor folks might actually produce more carbon than the middle class, with older vehicles in disrepair and poorly insulated homes) I would expect flights to be what really sets the average.
- imtringued 3y agoThe problem with the dividend is that politicians will say something stupid like "we can't pay the dividends because we already spent the money". Any sane politician should pay the dividend before the tax is introduced, because that makes the tax more palatable and less delayable, because you're already bleeding money.
- wtcactus 3y agoWell, yes. The only block of countries reducing it are the EU (making our life miserable), the USA at most is maintaining it, and China, India, all of Africa and mostly all others, are pumping out more and more of it. European are sacrificing themselves for no practical results. All in the name of appearances and what now counts as some perverted political correctness.
- stuaxo 3y agoCleaner air is a practical result - well, if we can persuade people to stop driving larger and larger petrol driven cars. Living in London and seeing a visible build up of black dust on my window frames every month or two I'd like cleaner air.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y agoThen move to the sticks! Dirt and crime is part of the city experience. "Part and parcel" some might say.
- themoonisachees 3y agoThis is a "sell their houses to who, Ben?" Moment. Just avoid the problem area! Its folkish to try to make your community a better place where... checks notes breathing clean air is possible, just go somewhere else!
- pests 3y agoIn the future but I doubt right now.
- euroderf 3y ago> the EU (making our life miserable) That's a strong statement. Can you be more specific ? I live in the EU and I have no complaints related to Union-level climate policies.
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- futureamish 3y ago"I mean, at every level, we are racing madly towards total catastrophe under the leadership of sociopathic fanatics. It’s as if some evil demon decided to take over the human species and drive them to self-destruction. Much of the world is trying to counter it, almost all the world, but the United States and Brazil are the extreme cases of racing with dedication towards disaster." - Noam Chomsky, 2020