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Decarbonization needs to happen anyway and is pretty much automatic energy independence. If the current US administration provides an extra motivation that’s ge
by adrianN 9mo ago
Decarbonization needs to happen anyway and is pretty much automatic energy independence. If the current US administration provides an extra motivation that’s gerast news for the climate.
- trollbridge 9mo agoAnd decarbonisation means nuclearisation. Which Europe has been moving in the opposite direction on, and instead got drunk on Russian gas.
- adrianN 9mo agoThat’s one way to do it, but not the only one.
- snowpid 9mo ago" And decarbonisation means nuclearisation. Which Europe has been moving in the opposite direction on " source? And I mean, more than "Germany phase out nuclear stations."
- groestl 9mo agoWe might be able to bring back some nuclear reactors, but building new one's: that's not on a feasible timeline.
- Reimersholme 9mo ago[dead]
- insane_dreamer 9mo agoThat's Germany, not Europe (and most certainly not France)
- inglor_cz 9mo ago"is pretty much automatic energy independence" Not if most of the necessary resources are mined elsewhere and most of the actual devices (such as solar panels) are manufactured elsewhere too. The best you can say is that in such situation, no one can cause you a problem overnight, but on a longer time horizon, they absolutely can.
- joe_mamba 9mo agoThat reasoning from your parent was like the child logic of "we don't need to kill animals for food, we can just buy chicken at the supermarket".
- collinmcnulty 9mo agoThat’s majorly moving the goalposts. Other than Saudi Arabia, I can’t think of any country in the world today that has more energy independence that you would get if you ran on renewables + battery + nuclear. You’d have years and years of buffer, compared to the US strategic oil reserve which has maybe a few months of buffer.
- inglor_cz 9mo agoCzechia is quite nuclear-friendly and yet we ran into a problem with nuclear fuel supply; you don't feed raw uranium into the reactor, you need specially designed fuel rods. Switching from Russian to American ones for our nuclear power plants took several years. We just finished doing so, and now there is a conflict between the US and the rest of the world as well. Lovely. All solvable, all better than just running out of oil, but I wouldn't call the situation "independence", just "having a better buffer".
- Moldoteck 9mo agoDidn't framatome started producing vver fuel elements?
- delecti 9mo agoThe US is currently a net oil exporter, and has been for a few years. Now of course that's not the whole picture, but if push came to shove, the US could achieve energy independence (at least technologically, if not poitically).
- collinmcnulty 9mo agoTrue, the US could supply all of its energy needs through great effort and by making its population pay much higher energy prices. In contrast, if a country were to build around e.g. solar, and then all countries that made the panels embargoed them, the price of electricity would merely stop falling.
- okokwhatever 9mo agoTry moving a tank on batteries
- inglor_cz 9mo agoLooking at the Russo-Ukrainian war, battery-powered drones seem to be more important than tanks right now. Russia, famously, had a lot of tanks; now, Oryx has a lot of their metal carcasses. Gone are the days of mass T-34 attacks that decided entire wars. I will concede your point on heavier aircraft, though.
- soco 9mo agoBetween zero fossil and full fossil there's a world of nuances, too often ignored. How much oil are those heavier aircraft using, as percentage of the whole country usage? The difference is the answer needed.
- inglor_cz 9mo agoIt is not just oil, but the necessity to keep up the entire separate infrastructure for its refining, processing, storage and distribution. Imagine a world where the railroad, for some reason, is still stuck with steam engines and black coal. Everything else moved on, but they cannot, thus keeping the mines open etc. Very uncomfortable and far from optimal.
- soco 9mo agoWe still have coal mines open, what do you mean? For less and less uses, yes, but they still have their uses, and we are not (nor should be) judging them for that.
- inglor_cz 9mo agoThe last coal mine in my country just closed a few days ago, 244 years after mining started. I am a bit influenced by this, because I live in that region.
- joe_mamba 9mo agoYeah, but if you deindustrialize by the time you decarbonize, because your industry left or went bust from expensive energy and environmental regulations, you now have an even bigger problem.
- jonplackett 9mo agoHow is renewable in any way independent if we don’t mine the necessary things nor manufacture the things.
- consumer451 9mo agoMy understanding is that wind turbine + PV + battery storage has a cycle where you buy once every twenty years, or more. So you buy once, and have twenty years to figure out the next buy cycle, geopolitical cycles and all. On the fossil fuel side, you need to buy many times per year, every year. Each one of those buy events is an opportunity for an external party for stop your economy. The renewable buy cycle is harder for an external party to interrupt. edit: This is vastly over-simplified, but I hope my understanding reflects reality at least somewhat.
- spwa4 9mo agoYeah. I've been wondering to what extent this is keeping the global geopolitics stable. Rich countries are keeping many other countries stable-ish that would otherwise rapidly devolve into disaster (obviously the middle east being the huge example). Even going so far as keeping countries stable-ish at the request of those countries (Egypt and Jordan being examples) despite those countries not really being oil countries. When that incentive disappears, as it will, what then? There is no way in hell the middle east can defend against Iranian aggression without other people doing it for them. And it's not just the middle east. The consequences of isolationism will lower enormously. Why won't rich countries just lock the border and dig in? We're not even that far removed from finding out what will happen, it's only about 7 years away. I'd love some early warning though.
- jonplackett 9mo agoI think you have it a bit backwards. The reason we have Iran with an insane government and all the princes and total lack of democracy is BECAUSE of all the interference due to oil. America and before it Britain and the colonial powers just walked in there and stole everything and so now the region is divided into countries that were soccuessfully captured (Qatar etc) and countries that threw us out (Iran). If oil wasn’t as important it might be chaos for a while though because this dictatorships are propped up expressly so they can sell us cheap oil.
- balozi 9mo agoDecarbonization needs to happen anyway - that statement is issued as if its fact. A realist would would posit that energy independence, or energy security and its underlying national security implications should be arrived at by any means necessary, carbon or non-carbon based.
- adrianN 9mo agoSure, but there are really great reasons to get rid of fossil fuels and energy independence is a nice bonus. Countries tend to have multiple goals at the same time. It's nice if multiple problems have the same solution.
- nickserv 9mo agoEurope has little hydrocarbon reserves, so decarbonization is required for energy independence.
- pjc50 9mo agoYes, apart from small fracking possibilities, and the North Sea, which is shared between two non-EU European countries, UK and Norway. (as posted elsewhere, this was a critical problem for Nazi Germany!)
- Moldoteck 9mo agoNorth sea can be explored. Black sea is already explored through Neptune deep
- tapoxi 9mo agoCarbon based energy contributes to what amounts to be a multi-trillion dollar disaster and may even contribute to the destruction of a nation using it. Not to mention that such an investment is wasted capital. Change is accelerating and that energy infrastructure would need to be realistically dismantled in fairly short order.