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I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. I thought the only thing that would save us from the scourge is if renewables were cheaper, but even with

by stavros 8mo ago

I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. I thought the only thing that would save us from the scourge is if renewables were cheaper, but even with solar being cheaper than everything else, we're still deploying fossil fuels. Is it because of the interests of fossil fuel companies and their lobbying, or am I missing some economic factor?

null_ptr1 8mo ago
Ultimately, the answer is fuel density. So, for long distance untethered travel, like planes. Beyond that, it's plastics production and chemical manufacturing. We can switch to hydrogen for lots of stuff that requires carrying your fuel on your back, but some things get tougher because the density is just not the same as a hydrocarbon. These are all surmountable (biodiesel, carbon capture->fuel cycles, bioreactors, etc), but they take time and money. In the end, what will push us to get there are economic shocks. We're getting there, it's just painful.
- kelseyfrog 8mo ago
  Fuel density wouldn't be such an impactful attribute if the US military and geopolitical situation and strategy were different. Fuel density is logistically important and the US geographical position means that density is more important to the US than other nations. In other words, if we forecast that we'll be fighting foreign wars, fuel transport is an logistical problem that optimises for density.
  - kayodelycaon 8mo ago
    Fuel density matters to things like cars and semi-trucks. Right now you can’t build an electric version that can fully refuel in minutes. That makes fast, long-range travel impractical in an electric vehicle.
    - kelseyfrog 8mo ago
      Me searching for the electric tanks. ¯ \ _ ༼ •́ ͜ ʖ •̀ ༽ _ / ¯ Edit: I found them :D
      - ThatMedicIsASpy 8mo ago
        and I wonder which blown up tank would pollute the environment more
        kelseyfrog 8mo ago
        I don't really think that's really high up on military priorities list. But happy to be proven wrong on that.
        triceratops 8mo ago
        If you're worried about the environment don't get into wars. If you're in a war, worry about winning. Wars of the future will make heavy use of drones. They don't run on hydrocarbons.
      - kayodelycaon 8mo ago
        They didn’t make it past the drones.
      - make3 8mo ago
        tanks must represent like 0.001% of fuel consumption lol Road uses like cars, trucks and buses is 47% of all oil, and clearly an enormous fraction of that can be converted to use electricity instead
      - adrian_b 8mo ago
        I do not know if any such tanks are in production, but there where experimental electric tanks, just not with batteries, but with turbogenerators.
        kelseyfrog 8mo ago
        Great question! Turns out there are. The U.S. Military's Abrams Tank Is Going Hybrid [1]. I'm sure we'll get some comments saying why it's a terrible idea[2]. 1. https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-video-specs-power/ https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-vi... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484044
    - galago 8mo ago
      https://insideevs.com/news/758625/byd-megawatt-charging-demo-china/ https://insideevs.com/news/758625/byd-megawatt-charging-demo... "It's called Megawatt charging because it delivers 1,000 kilowatts of electrical power at 1,000 volts, which is twice as powerful as the fastest chargers we have here in the United States."
    - adrian_b 8mo ago
      Actually a few other HN threads have just discussed the latest Chinese electric cars that refuel in 5 minutes for a 250 miles range and which have a 500 miles range when fully charged. That makes fast, long-range travel quite practical in an electric vehicle. While this model greatly improves the charging speed, other electric cars introduced this year use sodium-ion batteries, which are heavier than lithium-ion batteries, but they have the advantage that in cold climates they do not lose either capacity or charging speed down to temperatures as low as minus 40 Celsius degrees, removing other limitation of electric cars. So hydrocarbon fuels are likely to remain non-replaceable only in aircraft and spacecraft, where weight really matters. However, hydrocarbon fuels can be synthesized from water and carbon dioxide, passing through syngas, by using solar energy, just not at a price competitive with fossil fuel.
- stavros 8mo ago
  No, that's fine, I get it that fossil fuels have incomparable density, but we're using them massively for stuff where density isn't that important. Anything inside a city, from transportation to homes to factories are already powered by electricity (or can be, e.g. cars), we're just inexplicably still using fossil fuels to create that electricity. The US grid is still 57% coal and gas.
  - BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
    Slightly tangential, we bought a 2014 Nissan Leaf about 18 months ago, against howls of protest from parents-in-laws and brother- and sister-in-laws with all the regular electric car FUD you hear (can't drive interstate on a single tank, can't tow a trailer, will explode and burn your house down). For our use-case, 95% of our trips are to the shops, to various kids sports, to school, to the bus/train station, visiting (local) family, and all are very short trips easily within the relatively short range of the Leaf: ~100km. We still have our existing cars, they just get used less in favour of the cheapest option for the job at hand. Even with our son being newly able to drive independently (so essentially needing to have three cars, rather than two, on the go at any one time), over the 18 months of owning the Leaf we've saved about 25% of the purchase price of the Leaf in spending less on petrol (including the electricity cost to charge the Leaf - which gets charged using the solar panels during the day, but more commonly using cheaper grid electricity non-peak overnight - yes, likely primarily off fossil fuels but from what I've read is more energy efficient than using petrol to power the car). My point being, analogous to the "right answer" being to only using energy-dense fuels when necessary, we use the cheaper electric vehicle option when applicable, and only burn the expensive stuff when the better option is unavailable. P.S. Looking at buying a newer EV with longer range, so there are additional and more flexible "better options", plus coming up to having a daughter who is also able to drive unaccompanied (four cars? :grimacing face:)
    - stavros 8mo ago
      I really don't understand how people offer "but that ten-hour trip I take once a year will be 40 minutes longer!" as criticism and completely ignore "my EV TCO will be half of an ICE". Humans really do not like change, the problems you have now are swept under the rug but tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones.
- chrysoprace 8mo ago
  In Australia the answer is political lobbying, without a doubt. We had an emissions trading scheme[0] in 2012 meant to help in a transition to clean energy sources that was aggressively lobbied against by Australia's largest polluters and lasted only 2 years before being repealed by the incoming government by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for. This led to a decade of policy stagnation[1] where we could've been transitioning away from fossil fuels. So while energy density is definitely a factor, political lobbying is absolutely a factor. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Pollution_Reduction_Scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Pollution_Reduction_Sch... [1] https://www.ft.com/content/0a453f5c-e859-4300-9355-46822c45172b?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/0a453f5c-e859-4300-9355-46822c451...
  - dmix 8mo ago
    > by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for. Are the quotes here implying there wasn't a cost imposed on the public to artificially speed up a transition to green energy? Might as well be honest about it and say it's a "temporary sacrifice for the greater good" or something. Otherwise it's just another form of political spin.
    - BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
      It was an enforcement of paying a (small) portion of the externalities as a result of the use of fossil fuels. The "tax" was to be paid by the largest polluters, hence their lobbying against it. It wasn't something the citizens had to pay for unless the largest polluters decided to raise their prices as a result of this "tax". Asking polluters to decrease their profits, as it becomes increasingly obvious that their profits are based on making life worse for the entire planet for the future, I think, is not too grand an ask. "That's how it has always been" is not a reason not to act to improve "how it could be".
      - dmix 8mo ago
        Those schemes always seemed to me like a whole lot of lipstick and pretty packaging on something that could just be pitched with more honesty, and without creating a maze of extra corporate accounting costs and loopholes. Just raise a tax to pay for investment in green energy that will eventually compete on price and be self-sustaining, while also providing lots of environmental benefits and potentially increase industrial competition with China. The only reason a politician would come up with a complex carbon scheme like that is if they knew a tax would be unpopular with the public. Which mostly translates to a lack of good communication or a disregard for the public's intelligence.
- api 8mo ago
  Aviation is a few percent of global emissions. All aviation. It’s probably the hardest thing to replace but if we can’t we will be okay. Long haul trucking and shipping and remote site power are probably the next hardest things, and maybe coal for metallurgy, but these are also small compared to emissions from electricity generation and routine car transit. The big sources can be completely converted.
  - andriy_koval 8mo ago
    I suspect even if all oil will be gone, it will be possible to maintain some solar -> synthetic fuel chain for aviation on large scale.
    - api 8mo ago
      You could probably fill a 737 with biodiesel today and fly it. A jet will run on anything combustible within the right ignition temperature, density, and viscosity ranges and diesel is not far from kerosene aka jet fuel. I mean, you could probably almost run a jet turbine on bacon grease if you kept it warm to keep it from solidifying. Some military stuff is intentionally made to be as “flex fuel” as possible in case you are cut off from official supply lines and have to do something like gas up a plane with road diesel of unknown quality. You wouldn’t just do things like that with a million dollar plane since it might be bad for the engine but if the engine were tuned for it it’d be fine.
- GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
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idontwantthis 8mo ago
They are growing all over the world at a phenomenal rate, but I think it just takes some amount of time. They have only been the cheapest option for a few years now. And in the U.S., Republicans have done everything they can to hamstring the transition and destroy the billions of dollars invested by automakers into EVs prior to 2025. But even that can only postpone the transition.
- simonh 8mo ago
  Also they’re only the cheapest at the point of generation, you then need to transfer that energy where it’s needed, and when it’s needed (storage). Also manufacturing capacity for renewables infrastructure, vehicles, batteries, etc, etc, is constrained. And then there are products that can’t be substituted by renewables such as plastics, fertiliser, etc. So many factors. It can’t happen too soon, but it will take many decades.
cjbgkagh 8mo ago
My hope is that it’s bureaucratic inertia. There really is little excuse. Especially with super high voltage power lines becoming more affordable.
- solid_fuel 8mo ago
  I mean, the US was deploying significantly more renewable energy projects during the last administration than ever before, but the corrupt trump administration stopped many of them immediately after reentering office. The bureaucracy was moving the right direction - towards renewables - until the conservatives in this country deliberately changed strategy to emphasize fossil fuels again. You can draw your own conclusions about motive, but this isn’t an accident.
  - cjbgkagh 8mo ago
    I wasn’t even thinking about the US but consider this administration an interlude. I’m hearing other countries they’re putting the breaks on Chinese solar in an effort to build indigenous production capacity which is incredibly stupid. At least solar scales down so individuals can circumvent and get their own.
    - DoctorOetker 8mo ago
      I am curious what the drawbacks are for building indigenous photovoltaic production?
      - cjbgkagh 8mo ago
        Cost, especially if bootstrapping as your more expensive electricity is used to make your still more expensive panels. If you are going to onshore production it would be far cheaper to bootstrap on Chinese panels.
        DoctorOetker 8mo ago
        I'm not sure its such a bad thing for the climate though: its not like the Chinese photovoltaics will sit in a warehouse gathering dust, they would probably be sold in other nations, too poor to afford Western domestic production, at least initially. I don't see a reason why Western photovoltaics couldn't be made at the same price or even cheaper than Chinese ones eventually. Automation eventually nullifies differential wage labor and environmental safety costs compared to China.
RRRA 8mo ago
It's 100% economic corruption and populist/fascists forcing it down everyone's throat through extreme manipulation. yes... We might always need some for various materials and industrial process, but wasting it on ground transportation is beyond absurd at this point.
kayodelycaon 8mo ago
Renewables require power storage. Batteries are large, heavy, expensive, and the power dense ones have absolutely horrendous failure modes. There are other storage options, but they require even more space than batteries. Oil and gasoline require very little space, have easy to handle failure modes, and aren’t that expensive to operate. Not expensive enough to justify changing nationwide logistics and support. It’s also far cheaper to keep using fossil fuels for a year than build out entirely new infrastructure.
- BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
  I'm not sure the failure modes are too significantly different. I think it's likely you may consider them 'easy to handle' is because there's been years to learn how to handle these failure modes (which is a positive, but for reasons not inherent to the power source itself). It's always far cheaper to keep status quo X than move to new thing Y. Until it isn't. Especially if you don't take into account externalities. Increased instances of flooding, cyclones, and wildfires gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. Losing ground to competitors can be fatally expensive in the long term. Such things require the ability and will to think and prepare long-term, and it feels as if humanity has been migrating in the opposite direction since the 70's.
  - kayodelycaon 8mo ago
    Oil doesn’t make self-oxidizing metal fires. You can easily put out an oil or gas fire with water and it will stay out once cooled off. You have to just let lithium batteries burn and even if you get them extinguished, there’s no where to store, transport, or recycle them safely because they reignite without warning at any temperature. Yes, there are mitigations, but that doesn’t change how fundamentally dangerous they are. Gas tanks do not spontaneously ignite if punctured. Gas is easily cleaned up. Batteries become permanently unsafe and can catastrophically fail at any time with no warning.
instagib 8mo ago
Time, production capacity, and materials. I’ve seen 1yr lead times on electric equipment to install charging stations. Copper supply issues with a huge rollout. $150/barrel, much higher prices everywhere, less fertilizer, and less oil available could spur a faster turnover.
- stavros 8mo ago
  Fingers crossed.
- fy20 8mo ago
  I'm building a house (in Europe) and lead times on things are ridiculous now. I ordered some plumbing parts from a well known German manufacturer in February and am still waiting, the retailer can't give me an exact date yet. Same thing happened a few months ago when I tried to order a network switch, after a month and a half I cancelled the order. I've just ordered appliances, that I won't need for a few months, just because I don't know how long they will actually take, and maybe on a month the price will have shot up.
jmyeet 8mo ago
So the problem is that we have a bunch of people making pronouncements about things they don't understand. I would encourage anyone to look into what fossil fuels are actually used for because energy is only part of it. Some energy is for fuel (eg ships, planes) for which we currently have no substitute. A big chunk is electricity generation but there are so many other non-energy uses of fossil fuels eg fertilizers, construction, roads, plastics and other industrial uses. China has undergone a decades long project to get to the point where they are the world leader (and almost sole supplier) of renewable energy tech. The plunging cost of solar happened because of China. This is a national project for them and no other country that I can think of has the willpower, organization and commitment for the deacdes-long quest to wean oneself off of fossil fuels. Just between the rollout of EVs and power generation, you need a massive amount of infrastructure associated with it. Upgraded power lines, chargers, etc. Plus all the vehicles. Plus all the materials for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc. Those supply chains are completely dominated by China. Just look at the LA to SF HSR project. This will likely take 20+ years and cost $100-200B, if it ever even happens. 20 years ago, China had a single HSR line in Shanghai to the airport. Now it has a 30,000+ mile network that carries 4M+ passengers a day and I've seen estimates that the entire network cost less than $1T. California HSR is 10-20% of that budget. For one line. They reformed every level of government for this project. There is no expensive and corrupt procurement process for every city, every region, every line. They use the same rolling stock everywhere. Permitting for building the tracks and stations is streamlined. They make their own trains. My point with this example is twofold: 1. EVs and electricity are only a fraction of the fossil fuel picture; and 2. Weaning ourselves off of that is a decades-long project in countries that have no track record or political will to pull that off.
- ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
  I'm pretty sure that natural gas is a significant component of plastic manufacture. Plastic ain't going anywhere, anytime soon (although many people wish it would).
- dalyons 8mo ago
  Cars and electriciy are the overwhelming majority of all fossil fuel use. Let’s just focusing on tranistioning them first, and we’ll be in so much of a better place. The rest can wait
cdrnsf 8mo ago
Demand from data centers isn’t helping anything.
- stavros 8mo ago
  Demand for electricity is irrelevant, it's the supply we have to solve.
  - cdrnsf 8mo ago
    How so? Spinning up or keeping online fossil fuel plants to power text extruding machines hardly aligns with the goal of switching to renewable energy.
    - stavros 8mo ago
      The solution seems simple, though: Just don't do that. "We shouldn't want to use the energy in that way" doesn't really seem like anything.
newyankee 8mo ago
Because the upside (with barely single digit margins if it exists) is mostly China and no one else being able to compete at that scale. Something like skin in the game. US (low), EU(moderate), China (high), Global South (high with caveats to leapfrog but financing crunch always there) Renewables need front loaded funding compared to Oil & Gas which are the incumbents that make them sticky. Otherwise is a lot of US consumers were rational and only price minded they would've run TCO calculators on EV vs ICE for day to day use even without subsidies
georgemcbay 8mo ago
> I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. Global politics. Switching to renewables is seen as capitulation to China because of their lead in tech in this area, especially when you consider that renewables generally introduce battery dependence. They don't even try to hide this anymore. Watch US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick at the WEF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY0t0h1gXzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY0t0h1gXzk Explicitly stated: Don't be subservient to China. Not vocalized, but the obvious alternative: Instead be subservient to the USA and various allied Persian Gulf (and hijacked Latin American) countries who will keep pushing the petrol alternative until it literally runs dry, even if they have to do it at gunpoint.
anonyggs 8mo ago
The real issue was calling them fossil fuels.
cm2187 8mo ago
In the UK, wind is super volatile and isn't viable without LNG. You can have two weeks without wind several times a year. So more wind means more LNG.
jjk166 8mo ago
We're not really adding much more fossil fuel capacity. 88% of new capacity under construction in the US is renewable. Of the fossil fuel capacity that is being added, it's overwhelmingly coal-to-gas conversions and peaker plants that help to deal with the variability in renewable generation. It will take a long time before the fossil fuel capacity we've already built gets phased out, and of course certain developing nations are still adding dirtier fuel sources, but renewables getting cheap is working.
- stavros 8mo ago
  Ahh, interesting, I didn't realize the current mix is because of legacy plants, but I guess it makes sense that it wouldn't all be phased out immediately.
  - ethbr1 8mo ago
    >> certain developing nations are still adding dirtier fuel sources I'd look at this from a more nuanced viewpoint of certain nations still adding sovereign fuel sources. Read: India / China and coal
    - triceratops 8mo ago
      In 2024 88% of China's new electricity generation also came from solar and wind. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn India is further behind but improving rapidly. Its entire grid is still on track to be 42% renewable by 2030. The US is 42% today and expected to be 58% by the same time. Developing countries use the cheapest source of energy, period. Today that's solar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308960
      - M95D 8mo ago
        I only count 56% from the link you gave, and that includes all renewables. Where did you get that 88%?
airstrike 8mo ago
Renewables are heavily subsidized. Fossil fuels are heavily lobbied for. The result is inertia.
throwaway27448 8mo ago
> I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. These fit an energy niche that can't be replaced with any one thing. China is just now investing in an electric military, for instance. Shipping will remain difficult to electrify entirely (which is surmountable, but certainly not in production). Coal and natural gas plants provide on-demand power that is not straightforward to guarantee with renewable sources. And there are many (likely almost all) grids that are simply not up to the task of transmitting energy that used to be transmitted by physically moving fossil fuels. Air flight has no renewable alternative as of today—though, I suppose we technically do have renewable forms of jet fuel, it's extremely expensive. & of course we will need byproducts for the forseeable future for fertilizer, materials, chip production, etc etc. It'll take a couple generations. Of course we should be paying poor countries to not use fossil fuels, but instead we're trying to force switching back to fossil fuels ourselves for no explicable reason (as an american obv).
topspin 8mo ago
> am I missing some economic factor? That's the big mystery. We're told wind+solar are super cheap. Cheaper than everything. Cheap, cheap, cheap. You'd think, renewables being so cheap, it would rapidly displace all the expensive stuff. But it does not. All sources of energy grow simultaneously, despite the plentiful anecdotes about limited regional shifts in specific markets. So that creates doubt about the "cheap" claims. Such doubts, however, aren't generally welcome, and it's best to keep these thoughts to yourself, should they emerge. Carefully asking questions, as you've done, is the least damaging approach to coping with this apparent contradiction. I don't recommend ascribing it to nefarious conspiracies: that creates poor mental habits that don't end well. In the meantime, there are concepts such as LCOE+ that deal with the real economics of energy supply and demand that can inform you on the matter. You'll want to be careful here, however. You'll encounter ideas that don't align well with preferred narratives and, if you're not careful with such knowledge, you might inadvertently peg yourself as being aligned with counter-narrative forces. And that's never good for kudos.
- stavros 8mo ago
  > All sources of energy grow simultaneously, despite the plentiful anecdotes about limited regional shifts in specific markets. Do you have a source for that? What I can find points to the opposite: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67005 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67005 And globally: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/breakdown-of-global-electricity-generation-by-source-2019-2030 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/breakdown-of-...
  - topspin 8mo ago
    Your first source is electricity in the US. The second limited to electricity. Electricity is only a subset of the matter. The energy issues created by the most recent Iran drama, for example, are mostly about oil: not a primary electricity generation fuel. Here is a broader view. Global consumption, not limited to electricity. Everything, with the exception of biomass which has merely leveled off (for now,) is growing: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
bean469 8mo ago
> I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. Because it's in the corporate interests of many multi-billion dollar companies that lobby politicians

by stavros 8mo ago

null_ptr1 8mo ago

Ultimately, the answer is fuel density. So, for long distance untethered travel, like planes. Beyond that, it's plastics production and chemical manufacturing. We can switch to hydrogen for lots of stuff that requires carrying your fuel on your back, but some things get tougher because the density is just not the same as a hydrocarbon. These are all surmountable (biodiesel, carbon capture->fuel cycles, bioreactors, etc), but they take time and money. In the end, what will push us to get there are economic shocks. We're getting there, it's just painful.

kelseyfrog 8mo ago
Fuel density wouldn't be such an impactful attribute if the US military and geopolitical situation and strategy were different. Fuel density is logistically important and the US geographical position means that density is more important to the US than other nations. In other words, if we forecast that we'll be fighting foreign wars, fuel transport is an logistical problem that optimises for density.
- kayodelycaon 8mo ago
  Fuel density matters to things like cars and semi-trucks. Right now you can’t build an electric version that can fully refuel in minutes. That makes fast, long-range travel impractical in an electric vehicle.
  - kelseyfrog 8mo ago
    Me searching for the electric tanks. ¯ \ _ ༼ •́ ͜ ʖ •̀ ༽ _ / ¯ Edit: I found them :D
    - ThatMedicIsASpy 8mo ago
      and I wonder which blown up tank would pollute the environment more
      - kelseyfrog 8mo ago
        I don't really think that's really high up on military priorities list. But happy to be proven wrong on that.
      - triceratops 8mo ago
        If you're worried about the environment don't get into wars. If you're in a war, worry about winning. Wars of the future will make heavy use of drones. They don't run on hydrocarbons.
    - kayodelycaon 8mo ago
      They didn’t make it past the drones.
    - make3 8mo ago
      tanks must represent like 0.001% of fuel consumption lol Road uses like cars, trucks and buses is 47% of all oil, and clearly an enormous fraction of that can be converted to use electricity instead
    - adrian_b 8mo ago
      I do not know if any such tanks are in production, but there where experimental electric tanks, just not with batteries, but with turbogenerators.
      - kelseyfrog 8mo ago
        Great question! Turns out there are. The U.S. Military's Abrams Tank Is Going Hybrid [1]. I'm sure we'll get some comments saying why it's a terrible idea[2]. 1. https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-video-specs-power/ https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-vi... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484044
  - galago 8mo ago
    https://insideevs.com/news/758625/byd-megawatt-charging-demo-china/ https://insideevs.com/news/758625/byd-megawatt-charging-demo... "It's called Megawatt charging because it delivers 1,000 kilowatts of electrical power at 1,000 volts, which is twice as powerful as the fastest chargers we have here in the United States."
  - adrian_b 8mo ago
    Actually a few other HN threads have just discussed the latest Chinese electric cars that refuel in 5 minutes for a 250 miles range and which have a 500 miles range when fully charged. That makes fast, long-range travel quite practical in an electric vehicle. While this model greatly improves the charging speed, other electric cars introduced this year use sodium-ion batteries, which are heavier than lithium-ion batteries, but they have the advantage that in cold climates they do not lose either capacity or charging speed down to temperatures as low as minus 40 Celsius degrees, removing other limitation of electric cars. So hydrocarbon fuels are likely to remain non-replaceable only in aircraft and spacecraft, where weight really matters. However, hydrocarbon fuels can be synthesized from water and carbon dioxide, passing through syngas, by using solar energy, just not at a price competitive with fossil fuel.
stavros 8mo ago
No, that's fine, I get it that fossil fuels have incomparable density, but we're using them massively for stuff where density isn't that important. Anything inside a city, from transportation to homes to factories are already powered by electricity (or can be, e.g. cars), we're just inexplicably still using fossil fuels to create that electricity. The US grid is still 57% coal and gas.
- BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
  Slightly tangential, we bought a 2014 Nissan Leaf about 18 months ago, against howls of protest from parents-in-laws and brother- and sister-in-laws with all the regular electric car FUD you hear (can't drive interstate on a single tank, can't tow a trailer, will explode and burn your house down). For our use-case, 95% of our trips are to the shops, to various kids sports, to school, to the bus/train station, visiting (local) family, and all are very short trips easily within the relatively short range of the Leaf: ~100km. We still have our existing cars, they just get used less in favour of the cheapest option for the job at hand. Even with our son being newly able to drive independently (so essentially needing to have three cars, rather than two, on the go at any one time), over the 18 months of owning the Leaf we've saved about 25% of the purchase price of the Leaf in spending less on petrol (including the electricity cost to charge the Leaf - which gets charged using the solar panels during the day, but more commonly using cheaper grid electricity non-peak overnight - yes, likely primarily off fossil fuels but from what I've read is more energy efficient than using petrol to power the car). My point being, analogous to the "right answer" being to only using energy-dense fuels when necessary, we use the cheaper electric vehicle option when applicable, and only burn the expensive stuff when the better option is unavailable. P.S. Looking at buying a newer EV with longer range, so there are additional and more flexible "better options", plus coming up to having a daughter who is also able to drive unaccompanied (four cars? :grimacing face:)
  - stavros 8mo ago
    I really don't understand how people offer "but that ten-hour trip I take once a year will be 40 minutes longer!" as criticism and completely ignore "my EV TCO will be half of an ICE". Humans really do not like change, the problems you have now are swept under the rug but tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones.
chrysoprace 8mo ago
In Australia the answer is political lobbying, without a doubt. We had an emissions trading scheme[0] in 2012 meant to help in a transition to clean energy sources that was aggressively lobbied against by Australia's largest polluters and lasted only 2 years before being repealed by the incoming government by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for. This led to a decade of policy stagnation[1] where we could've been transitioning away from fossil fuels. So while energy density is definitely a factor, political lobbying is absolutely a factor. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Pollution_Reduction_Scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Pollution_Reduction_Sch... [1] https://www.ft.com/content/0a453f5c-e859-4300-9355-46822c45172b?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/0a453f5c-e859-4300-9355-46822c451...
- dmix 8mo ago
  > by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for. Are the quotes here implying there wasn't a cost imposed on the public to artificially speed up a transition to green energy? Might as well be honest about it and say it's a "temporary sacrifice for the greater good" or something. Otherwise it's just another form of political spin.
  - BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
    It was an enforcement of paying a (small) portion of the externalities as a result of the use of fossil fuels. The "tax" was to be paid by the largest polluters, hence their lobbying against it. It wasn't something the citizens had to pay for unless the largest polluters decided to raise their prices as a result of this "tax". Asking polluters to decrease their profits, as it becomes increasingly obvious that their profits are based on making life worse for the entire planet for the future, I think, is not too grand an ask. "That's how it has always been" is not a reason not to act to improve "how it could be".
    - dmix 8mo ago
      Those schemes always seemed to me like a whole lot of lipstick and pretty packaging on something that could just be pitched with more honesty, and without creating a maze of extra corporate accounting costs and loopholes. Just raise a tax to pay for investment in green energy that will eventually compete on price and be self-sustaining, while also providing lots of environmental benefits and potentially increase industrial competition with China. The only reason a politician would come up with a complex carbon scheme like that is if they knew a tax would be unpopular with the public. Which mostly translates to a lack of good communication or a disregard for the public's intelligence.
api 8mo ago
Aviation is a few percent of global emissions. All aviation. It’s probably the hardest thing to replace but if we can’t we will be okay. Long haul trucking and shipping and remote site power are probably the next hardest things, and maybe coal for metallurgy, but these are also small compared to emissions from electricity generation and routine car transit. The big sources can be completely converted.
- andriy_koval 8mo ago
  I suspect even if all oil will be gone, it will be possible to maintain some solar -> synthetic fuel chain for aviation on large scale.
  - api 8mo ago
    You could probably fill a 737 with biodiesel today and fly it. A jet will run on anything combustible within the right ignition temperature, density, and viscosity ranges and diesel is not far from kerosene aka jet fuel. I mean, you could probably almost run a jet turbine on bacon grease if you kept it warm to keep it from solidifying. Some military stuff is intentionally made to be as “flex fuel” as possible in case you are cut off from official supply lines and have to do something like gas up a plane with road diesel of unknown quality. You wouldn’t just do things like that with a million dollar plane since it might be bad for the engine but if the engine were tuned for it it’d be fine.
GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
[dead]

idontwantthis 8mo ago

They are growing all over the world at a phenomenal rate, but I think it just takes some amount of time. They have only been the cheapest option for a few years now. And in the U.S., Republicans have done everything they can to hamstring the transition and destroy the billions of dollars invested by automakers into EVs prior to 2025. But even that can only postpone the transition.

simonh 8mo ago
Also they’re only the cheapest at the point of generation, you then need to transfer that energy where it’s needed, and when it’s needed (storage). Also manufacturing capacity for renewables infrastructure, vehicles, batteries, etc, etc, is constrained. And then there are products that can’t be substituted by renewables such as plastics, fertiliser, etc. So many factors. It can’t happen too soon, but it will take many decades.

cjbgkagh 8mo ago

My hope is that it’s bureaucratic inertia. There really is little excuse. Especially with super high voltage power lines becoming more affordable.

solid_fuel 8mo ago
I mean, the US was deploying significantly more renewable energy projects during the last administration than ever before, but the corrupt trump administration stopped many of them immediately after reentering office. The bureaucracy was moving the right direction - towards renewables - until the conservatives in this country deliberately changed strategy to emphasize fossil fuels again. You can draw your own conclusions about motive, but this isn’t an accident.
- cjbgkagh 8mo ago
  I wasn’t even thinking about the US but consider this administration an interlude. I’m hearing other countries they’re putting the breaks on Chinese solar in an effort to build indigenous production capacity which is incredibly stupid. At least solar scales down so individuals can circumvent and get their own.
  - DoctorOetker 8mo ago
    I am curious what the drawbacks are for building indigenous photovoltaic production?
    - cjbgkagh 8mo ago
      Cost, especially if bootstrapping as your more expensive electricity is used to make your still more expensive panels. If you are going to onshore production it would be far cheaper to bootstrap on Chinese panels.
      - DoctorOetker 8mo ago
        I'm not sure its such a bad thing for the climate though: its not like the Chinese photovoltaics will sit in a warehouse gathering dust, they would probably be sold in other nations, too poor to afford Western domestic production, at least initially. I don't see a reason why Western photovoltaics couldn't be made at the same price or even cheaper than Chinese ones eventually. Automation eventually nullifies differential wage labor and environmental safety costs compared to China.

RRRA 8mo ago

It's 100% economic corruption and populist/fascists forcing it down everyone's throat through extreme manipulation. yes... We might always need some for various materials and industrial process, but wasting it on ground transportation is beyond absurd at this point.

kayodelycaon 8mo ago

Renewables require power storage. Batteries are large, heavy, expensive, and the power dense ones have absolutely horrendous failure modes. There are other storage options, but they require even more space than batteries. Oil and gasoline require very little space, have easy to handle failure modes, and aren’t that expensive to operate. Not expensive enough to justify changing nationwide logistics and support. It’s also far cheaper to keep using fossil fuels for a year than build out entirely new infrastructure.

BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
I'm not sure the failure modes are too significantly different. I think it's likely you may consider them 'easy to handle' is because there's been years to learn how to handle these failure modes (which is a positive, but for reasons not inherent to the power source itself). It's always far cheaper to keep status quo X than move to new thing Y. Until it isn't. Especially if you don't take into account externalities. Increased instances of flooding, cyclones, and wildfires gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. Losing ground to competitors can be fatally expensive in the long term. Such things require the ability and will to think and prepare long-term, and it feels as if humanity has been migrating in the opposite direction since the 70's.
- kayodelycaon 8mo ago
  Oil doesn’t make self-oxidizing metal fires. You can easily put out an oil or gas fire with water and it will stay out once cooled off. You have to just let lithium batteries burn and even if you get them extinguished, there’s no where to store, transport, or recycle them safely because they reignite without warning at any temperature. Yes, there are mitigations, but that doesn’t change how fundamentally dangerous they are. Gas tanks do not spontaneously ignite if punctured. Gas is easily cleaned up. Batteries become permanently unsafe and can catastrophically fail at any time with no warning.

instagib 8mo ago

Time, production capacity, and materials. I’ve seen 1yr lead times on electric equipment to install charging stations. Copper supply issues with a huge rollout. $150/barrel, much higher prices everywhere, less fertilizer, and less oil available could spur a faster turnover.

stavros 8mo ago
Fingers crossed.
fy20 8mo ago
I'm building a house (in Europe) and lead times on things are ridiculous now. I ordered some plumbing parts from a well known German manufacturer in February and am still waiting, the retailer can't give me an exact date yet. Same thing happened a few months ago when I tried to order a network switch, after a month and a half I cancelled the order. I've just ordered appliances, that I won't need for a few months, just because I don't know how long they will actually take, and maybe on a month the price will have shot up.

jmyeet 8mo ago

So the problem is that we have a bunch of people making pronouncements about things they don't understand. I would encourage anyone to look into what fossil fuels are actually used for because energy is only part of it. Some energy is for fuel (eg ships, planes) for which we currently have no substitute. A big chunk is electricity generation but there are so many other non-energy uses of fossil fuels eg fertilizers, construction, roads, plastics and other industrial uses. China has undergone a decades long project to get to the point where they are the world leader (and almost sole supplier) of renewable energy tech. The plunging cost of solar happened because of China. This is a national project for them and no other country that I can think of has the willpower, organization and commitment for the deacdes-long quest to wean oneself off of fossil fuels. Just between the rollout of EVs and power generation, you need a massive amount of infrastructure associated with it. Upgraded power lines, chargers, etc. Plus all the vehicles. Plus all the materials for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc. Those supply chains are completely dominated by China. Just look at the LA to SF HSR project. This will likely take 20+ years and cost $100-200B, if it ever even happens. 20 years ago, China had a single HSR line in Shanghai to the airport. Now it has a 30,000+ mile network that carries 4M+ passengers a day and I've seen estimates that the entire network cost less than $1T. California HSR is 10-20% of that budget. For one line. They reformed every level of government for this project. There is no expensive and corrupt procurement process for every city, every region, every line. They use the same rolling stock everywhere. Permitting for building the tracks and stations is streamlined. They make their own trains. My point with this example is twofold: 1. EVs and electricity are only a fraction of the fossil fuel picture; and 2. Weaning ourselves off of that is a decades-long project in countries that have no track record or political will to pull that off.

ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
I'm pretty sure that natural gas is a significant component of plastic manufacture. Plastic ain't going anywhere, anytime soon (although many people wish it would).
dalyons 8mo ago
Cars and electriciy are the overwhelming majority of all fossil fuel use. Let’s just focusing on tranistioning them first, and we’ll be in so much of a better place. The rest can wait

cdrnsf 8mo ago

Demand from data centers isn’t helping anything.

stavros 8mo ago
Demand for electricity is irrelevant, it's the supply we have to solve.
- cdrnsf 8mo ago
  How so? Spinning up or keeping online fossil fuel plants to power text extruding machines hardly aligns with the goal of switching to renewable energy.
  - stavros 8mo ago
    The solution seems simple, though: Just don't do that. "We shouldn't want to use the energy in that way" doesn't really seem like anything.

newyankee 8mo ago

Because the upside (with barely single digit margins if it exists) is mostly China and no one else being able to compete at that scale. Something like skin in the game. US (low), EU(moderate), China (high), Global South (high with caveats to leapfrog but financing crunch always there) Renewables need front loaded funding compared to Oil & Gas which are the incumbents that make them sticky. Otherwise is a lot of US consumers were rational and only price minded they would've run TCO calculators on EV vs ICE for day to day use even without subsidies

georgemcbay 8mo ago

> I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. Global politics. Switching to renewables is seen as capitulation to China because of their lead in tech in this area, especially when you consider that renewables generally introduce battery dependence. They don't even try to hide this anymore. Watch US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick at the WEF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY0t0h1gXzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY0t0h1gXzk Explicitly stated: Don't be subservient to China. Not vocalized, but the obvious alternative: Instead be subservient to the USA and various allied Persian Gulf (and hijacked Latin American) countries who will keep pushing the petrol alternative until it literally runs dry, even if they have to do it at gunpoint.

anonyggs 8mo ago

The real issue was calling them fossil fuels.

cm2187 8mo ago

In the UK, wind is super volatile and isn't viable without LNG. You can have two weeks without wind several times a year. So more wind means more LNG.

jjk166 8mo ago

We're not really adding much more fossil fuel capacity. 88% of new capacity under construction in the US is renewable. Of the fossil fuel capacity that is being added, it's overwhelmingly coal-to-gas conversions and peaker plants that help to deal with the variability in renewable generation. It will take a long time before the fossil fuel capacity we've already built gets phased out, and of course certain developing nations are still adding dirtier fuel sources, but renewables getting cheap is working.

stavros 8mo ago
Ahh, interesting, I didn't realize the current mix is because of legacy plants, but I guess it makes sense that it wouldn't all be phased out immediately.
- ethbr1 8mo ago
  >> certain developing nations are still adding dirtier fuel sources I'd look at this from a more nuanced viewpoint of certain nations still adding sovereign fuel sources. Read: India / China and coal
  - triceratops 8mo ago
    In 2024 88% of China's new electricity generation also came from solar and wind. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn India is further behind but improving rapidly. Its entire grid is still on track to be 42% renewable by 2030. The US is 42% today and expected to be 58% by the same time. Developing countries use the cheapest source of energy, period. Today that's solar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308960
    - M95D 8mo ago
      I only count 56% from the link you gave, and that includes all renewables. Where did you get that 88%?

airstrike 8mo ago

Renewables are heavily subsidized. Fossil fuels are heavily lobbied for. The result is inertia.

throwaway27448 8mo ago

> I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. These fit an energy niche that can't be replaced with any one thing. China is just now investing in an electric military, for instance. Shipping will remain difficult to electrify entirely (which is surmountable, but certainly not in production). Coal and natural gas plants provide on-demand power that is not straightforward to guarantee with renewable sources. And there are many (likely almost all) grids that are simply not up to the task of transmitting energy that used to be transmitted by physically moving fossil fuels. Air flight has no renewable alternative as of today—though, I suppose we technically do have renewable forms of jet fuel, it's extremely expensive. & of course we will need byproducts for the forseeable future for fertilizer, materials, chip production, etc etc. It'll take a couple generations. Of course we should be paying poor countries to not use fossil fuels, but instead we're trying to force switching back to fossil fuels ourselves for no explicable reason (as an american obv).

topspin 8mo ago

> am I missing some economic factor? That's the big mystery. We're told wind+solar are super cheap. Cheaper than everything. Cheap, cheap, cheap. You'd think, renewables being so cheap, it would rapidly displace all the expensive stuff. But it does not. All sources of energy grow simultaneously, despite the plentiful anecdotes about limited regional shifts in specific markets. So that creates doubt about the "cheap" claims. Such doubts, however, aren't generally welcome, and it's best to keep these thoughts to yourself, should they emerge. Carefully asking questions, as you've done, is the least damaging approach to coping with this apparent contradiction. I don't recommend ascribing it to nefarious conspiracies: that creates poor mental habits that don't end well. In the meantime, there are concepts such as LCOE+ that deal with the real economics of energy supply and demand that can inform you on the matter. You'll want to be careful here, however. You'll encounter ideas that don't align well with preferred narratives and, if you're not careful with such knowledge, you might inadvertently peg yourself as being aligned with counter-narrative forces. And that's never good for kudos.

stavros 8mo ago
> All sources of energy grow simultaneously, despite the plentiful anecdotes about limited regional shifts in specific markets. Do you have a source for that? What I can find points to the opposite: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67005 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67005 And globally: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/breakdown-of-global-electricity-generation-by-source-2019-2030 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/breakdown-of-...
- topspin 8mo ago
  Your first source is electricity in the US. The second limited to electricity. Electricity is only a subset of the matter. The energy issues created by the most recent Iran drama, for example, are mostly about oil: not a primary electricity generation fuel. Here is a broader view. Global consumption, not limited to electricity. Everything, with the exception of biomass which has merely leveled off (for now,) is growing: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...

bean469 8mo ago

> I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. Because it's in the corporate interests of many multi-billion dollar companies that lobby politicians