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It would be neat to see an alternate universe where there was zero corporate welfare for petroleum and for solar/wind/tidal/hydro. I imagine that in such a worl

It would be neat to see an alternate universe where there was zero corporate welfare for petroleum and for solar/wind/tidal/hydro. I imagine that in such a world, renewables would have become the default sometime in the 70s and millions of lives would have been saved due to fewer oil wars and cleaner air.

mdgrech23 3y ago
Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. What we need is world where we recognize that everyone owning their own personal automobile is probably a bad idea. We need walkable neighborhoods and public transportation but we also need to recognize how powerful fossil fuels are preserve them for heavy duty tasks that would be near impossible w/ human muscle and or renewables.
- Emma_Goldman 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Gre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
- snewman 3y ago
  Trains can often be electrified, as can semi trucks, though it will require substantial investment in heavy duty charging infrastructure. Long haul aviation, and probably long haul shipping, will likely continue to require chemical fuels (though Fleetzero aspires to electrify shipping). But multiple startups have promising routes to replacing fossil fuels with e-fuels for those applications (chemical fuels created using electricity, such as electrolysis and carbon capture, instead of pumping fossil fuel out of the ground).
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. Eh... The only one on your list that is currently a problem is planes. It's expensive powering semi trucks with them, that's why people mostly don't, and it's almost trivial for trains. There is also no fundamental reason why planes should be impossible. There are several well understood possibilities for them, but very few people have focused on solving this problem.
  - bumby 3y ago
    Semis/tractor-trailers are still a problem. Sure, they can make them run off batteries, but you have to forgo a lot of cargo capacity to do so, which makes the economics tough.
    - QuarterReptile 3y ago
      No discussion of battery trucks can go very far without reaching the conclusion that more freight must travel by rail. That's a correct conclusion, but for the same reasons it has never carried the day in the US for 75 years, that transition will continue to not happen.
      - bumby 3y ago
        I think you're right, but wouldn't this still necessitate freight to travel by truck from rail centers to population centers? That's how a lot of the system currently operates in the US, no?
        QuarterReptile 3y ago
        There should be no population center without a rail center. I don't deny that last-mile would still be on roads, but that's very different from the present state of affairs. My lazy googling suggests that 40% of freight movement is via rail in US. I can't find a full breakout, but the same site goes on to claim rail is only 1.7% of GHG, which means most of the rest is traveling by road, since waterborne freight is generally more efficient than rail.
        bumby 3y ago
        You do know we’re not starting with a blank slate, so how do you close that gap? Forced migration?
      - amoshebb 3y ago
        I've always dreamed of trolley-bus like wires strung along interstates paired with robotic self-attaching trolley-poles. In my head, semi-trucks (and maybe all cars?) only need 50-100 miles or so of range for low-speed (where batteries shine) warehouse/ports/downtown deliveries (or garage-charged commutes?). Almost every trip I've ever taken beyond ~20 miles included at least some portion on a highway. Electric interstates could allow NY to LA in one shot and pulling off the highway with 100 miles to make the round-trip to wherever a load needed to be dropped off. If attaching and detaching was automatic, there would be no need to electrify onramps or intersections or underpasses or anything expensive, just find the cheapest, straightest, easiest to electrify 80% of roads and slap up wires there.
- noelherrick 3y ago
  There are examples of all three that are electric, although planes are the hardest to make happen. Train electrification is so common that in English it is used in an expression: "touching the third rail". As with the debate between cars vs. trains, semis lose out to trains by a lot, even when trains use fossil fuels. Trains rule.
  - bumby 3y ago
    Trains rule until demographics change enough where rails no longer support geographic population centers. This is part of the reason politicians tend to favor buses over trains; besides the smaller upfront costs, buses are easier to change routes that support populations when needs change.
snewman 3y ago
Have you run the numbers on this, or are you just imagining? In the 70s, solar and (to a lesser but still substantial extent) wind were still extremely expensive, impractical for large scale use. As were the batteries that are needed to smooth out periods of low renewable generation. I'm an absolute supporter of renewables, and I'd love to see support for fossil fuels phased out, but it's been a long climb to reach the point where that's feasible.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s. It's not really clear what the result would have been. To really answer this you'd need to unpack the past two decades' worth of cost decreases in (e.g.,) PV and see how many of them would have been possible with late-20th century technology. My uneducated guess is that we could have moved the timelines forward at least a decade, and that matters a lot when you're dealing with exponential cost/deployment curves (not to mention possible climate feedbacks.)
  - empath-nirvana 3y ago
    > The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s. I'm not really sure it would have gone faster instead of just having been a very large waste of money. A lot of the reason that renewables are cheaper now has to do with 30 years of advancements in electronics and power storage and semiconductors and solid state materials etc etc etc that just _took that long to invent_. It's not like people decided a few years ago that 'oh it's time to invent better batteries'. There's always been motivation to build better batteries and people have been working on that non-stop since electricity was discovered. That counterfactual is like: What if we had invested more in building neural networks in 1970, where would we be today. Well, the problem is we didn't have cheap powerful GPUs back then, so it probably wouldn't have mattered? We sort of got cheap renewable energy "for free" from a lot of technologies that we invested in for other reasons.
QuarterReptile 3y ago
You could see some of it in the 20s, before the New Deal sunk a lot of renewables with the rural electrification act. Of course, the shape of the problem being 'solved' was very different then, but the neglect of emerging/improving technologies in favor of the government favorite is the same.
gosub100 3y ago
solar panels barely existed in the '70s. Nuclear would have become the default, probably at the cost of a few meltdowns, but the air still wouldn't be clean because battery (and manufacturing) technology wasn't up to par with what it is today.
MandieD 3y ago
The world where Mrs. Carter had the responsibility of deciding what Christmas decorations to put around the White House solar panels in the early 80s…

mdgrech23 3y ago

Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. What we need is world where we recognize that everyone owning their own personal automobile is probably a bad idea. We need walkable neighborhoods and public transportation but we also need to recognize how powerful fossil fuels are preserve them for heavy duty tasks that would be near impossible w/ human muscle and or renewables.

Emma_Goldman 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Gre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
snewman 3y ago
Trains can often be electrified, as can semi trucks, though it will require substantial investment in heavy duty charging infrastructure. Long haul aviation, and probably long haul shipping, will likely continue to require chemical fuels (though Fleetzero aspires to electrify shipping). But multiple startups have promising routes to replacing fossil fuels with e-fuels for those applications (chemical fuels created using electricity, such as electrolysis and carbon capture, instead of pumping fossil fuel out of the ground).
marcosdumay 3y ago
> Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. Eh... The only one on your list that is currently a problem is planes. It's expensive powering semi trucks with them, that's why people mostly don't, and it's almost trivial for trains. There is also no fundamental reason why planes should be impossible. There are several well understood possibilities for them, but very few people have focused on solving this problem.
- bumby 3y ago
  Semis/tractor-trailers are still a problem. Sure, they can make them run off batteries, but you have to forgo a lot of cargo capacity to do so, which makes the economics tough.
  - QuarterReptile 3y ago
    No discussion of battery trucks can go very far without reaching the conclusion that more freight must travel by rail. That's a correct conclusion, but for the same reasons it has never carried the day in the US for 75 years, that transition will continue to not happen.
    - bumby 3y ago
      I think you're right, but wouldn't this still necessitate freight to travel by truck from rail centers to population centers? That's how a lot of the system currently operates in the US, no?
      - QuarterReptile 3y ago
        There should be no population center without a rail center. I don't deny that last-mile would still be on roads, but that's very different from the present state of affairs. My lazy googling suggests that 40% of freight movement is via rail in US. I can't find a full breakout, but the same site goes on to claim rail is only 1.7% of GHG, which means most of the rest is traveling by road, since waterborne freight is generally more efficient than rail.
        bumby 3y ago
        You do know we’re not starting with a blank slate, so how do you close that gap? Forced migration?
    - amoshebb 3y ago
      I've always dreamed of trolley-bus like wires strung along interstates paired with robotic self-attaching trolley-poles. In my head, semi-trucks (and maybe all cars?) only need 50-100 miles or so of range for low-speed (where batteries shine) warehouse/ports/downtown deliveries (or garage-charged commutes?). Almost every trip I've ever taken beyond ~20 miles included at least some portion on a highway. Electric interstates could allow NY to LA in one shot and pulling off the highway with 100 miles to make the round-trip to wherever a load needed to be dropped off. If attaching and detaching was automatic, there would be no need to electrify onramps or intersections or underpasses or anything expensive, just find the cheapest, straightest, easiest to electrify 80% of roads and slap up wires there.
noelherrick 3y ago
There are examples of all three that are electric, although planes are the hardest to make happen. Train electrification is so common that in English it is used in an expression: "touching the third rail". As with the debate between cars vs. trains, semis lose out to trains by a lot, even when trains use fossil fuels. Trains rule.
- bumby 3y ago
  Trains rule until demographics change enough where rails no longer support geographic population centers. This is part of the reason politicians tend to favor buses over trains; besides the smaller upfront costs, buses are easier to change routes that support populations when needs change.

snewman 3y ago

Have you run the numbers on this, or are you just imagining? In the 70s, solar and (to a lesser but still substantial extent) wind were still extremely expensive, impractical for large scale use. As were the batteries that are needed to smooth out periods of low renewable generation. I'm an absolute supporter of renewables, and I'd love to see support for fossil fuels phased out, but it's been a long climb to reach the point where that's feasible.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s. It's not really clear what the result would have been. To really answer this you'd need to unpack the past two decades' worth of cost decreases in (e.g.,) PV and see how many of them would have been possible with late-20th century technology. My uneducated guess is that we could have moved the timelines forward at least a decade, and that matters a lot when you're dealing with exponential cost/deployment curves (not to mention possible climate feedbacks.)
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  > The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s. I'm not really sure it would have gone faster instead of just having been a very large waste of money. A lot of the reason that renewables are cheaper now has to do with 30 years of advancements in electronics and power storage and semiconductors and solid state materials etc etc etc that just _took that long to invent_. It's not like people decided a few years ago that 'oh it's time to invent better batteries'. There's always been motivation to build better batteries and people have been working on that non-stop since electricity was discovered. That counterfactual is like: What if we had invested more in building neural networks in 1970, where would we be today. Well, the problem is we didn't have cheap powerful GPUs back then, so it probably wouldn't have mattered? We sort of got cheap renewable energy "for free" from a lot of technologies that we invested in for other reasons.

QuarterReptile 3y ago

You could see some of it in the 20s, before the New Deal sunk a lot of renewables with the rural electrification act. Of course, the shape of the problem being 'solved' was very different then, but the neglect of emerging/improving technologies in favor of the government favorite is the same.

gosub100 3y ago

solar panels barely existed in the '70s. Nuclear would have become the default, probably at the cost of a few meltdowns, but the air still wouldn't be clean because battery (and manufacturing) technology wasn't up to par with what it is today.

MandieD 3y ago

The world where Mrs. Carter had the responsibility of deciding what Christmas decorations to put around the White House solar panels in the early 80s…