Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions(bloomberg.com) |
Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions(bloomberg.com) |
TBH, it is pretty surprising, considering that they should clearly be seeing the opportunity.
COO: "This is turning out to be hard"
CEO: "F*it, let the planet burn".
CFO: "I'm down with that, I'm retiring rich and have a good 10-20 years of cocaine and hookers before my house on the coast gets washed away"
You should too. It's not that hard.
I am doing it again, but in another city.
At least, provide for some citation to be worthy.
https://www.globe.gov/explore-science/scientists-blog/archiv...
2. Your link is about co2 exhaled which is a tiny fraction of a person's overall co2 emissions.
3. According to https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/climate-solutions/carbo..., the average American's carbon footprint is about 16 tons of co2 per year multiplied by the average American's lifespan of 77 years equals 1,200 tons of co2. According to every source I could find, the overwhelming majority of trees in the United States weigh a single digit number of tons fully grown, and trees aren't pure-carbon either. Further, many trees don't reach maturity and of those that do many release their carbon via decay and combustion.
Due diligence was needed ... by me.
(Then again, I often read about a trillion trees on this surface of this ball of mass, but quantization approach of this scale isn't my cup of tea).
The greater loss is that the new CEO had already scaled down Shell's investment in renewables, setting a target of 4.5% of the total investments in renewables by 2025[0].
Some other Oil&Gas companies seem to be a bit more inclined to actually invest in renewables, or at least pay lip service to it, e.g. ENI aims at 30% by 2025[1].
Remains to be seen how much will actually be invested.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-boost-dividend... [1] https://www.eni.com/en-IT/media/press-release/2022/03/pr-cap...
Honestly, this upsets people?
If demand were x+100, and theoretically some company wouldn't be able to afford to buy the offsets, it wouldn't somehow have ended up with the blame of Shell, they would just have found no one to solve their problem for them and would have to fix it themselves.
Of course this is assuming that whoever is selling the offsets is actually performing the task of carbon offsetting effectively, something that many believe is not actually happening so that puts things into even more murky waters.
Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years and the previous CEO was preparing their defense of "don't punish us for the sins of our fathers". Whereas Sawan is doubling down on "maximize this quarter, who cares about the future, not my problem".
That's all ignoring the: do you actually care at all if your great grandchildren have a habitable planet? (or maybe grandchildren at the rate we're going)
Which I presume are pretty much a minor fraction of the carbon footprint of their products and kinda makes the whole exercise a PR campaign.
Even when it would cover pipeline leaks and the like it's still nowhere near their total impact.
That is not to say you are wrong, it was maybe just that when a fossil fuel company tells you it's reducing it's carbon impact then the whole premise is going to be cynical at best.
Not counting the CO2 output of its product obviously.
Entirely predictable result of the narrow view of the CEO shareholder relationship.
I view this as more of an indictment of carbon credits than anything.
That's just not accurate. This is the CEO who basically cut all of their plans around renewables.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/shells-renewables-boss-leav...
This plan doesn’t even deserve being shelved. It deserves being shitcanned.
Article below is an example of challenges facing rolling out renewables. They are not all Oil and Gas related as generally perceived: https://archive.md/udhVH
There are also couple of really good books on the topic, which I am happy to share if the interest is there.
Generally, established companies have a lot of trouble, and often fail, adopting when the rules of business change.
In this case, Shell is having a lot of trouble adopting to carbon-free (or neurtral) energy.
IMO: I think the best approach is to seek out carbon-free (or neutral) energy business models and disrupt Shell out of business. From Shell's POV, the best thing they can do is invest in the disrupters and have them organically displace their existing fossil-fuel based businesses.
And no one has figured how to make AI work for the kinds of tasks people ask phones to do. It might be possible but no one's yet made it work so it's hard to argue that anyone is "behind" on this front when no one has brought even a commercial AI-based voice assistant to market which is has the lowest barrier to entry and the highest user tolerance for failure.
So I think you're right that a lot of old-guard tech is becoming too big to be agile but I'm less sure about the thing that will actually disrupt them.
To say this is to not know how Apple operates. They have been shipping local AI in phones for a decade now. Every phone has one of the best neural processors out there. Apple is better prepared than anyone. And that's before considering their remarkable restraint to not release something until they are happy with it. They are 100% working on LLMs and I'm sure they will do it their own way. This isnt some sort of fanboy post, it's their story. From OLED to the Mac transition to Apple silicon. Slowly, then all at once.
No, wait, private ownership and corporate freedom have actually been proven to be the pinnacle of human economic organizing, so please hand back the lighter and petrol to your demented grandparents and their delusions ideas.
Unfortunately, the people running and investing in these companies will be long dead when their decisions come back to bite us all in the ass.
Almost NONE of the comments in this forum so far reflect this observation, which I find concerning. If you are angry about the state of affairs here (which I would completely understand), at least read the article (and take a deep breath) before commenting
Offsets do not work. The best application of that funding would be to stop destruction of the ocean habitat. Short explanation: Almost all surface and atmospheric carbon ends up in the ocean by rivers or rainfall. Geological-timescale sequestration is performed by zooplankton et al in the form of CaCO3, but something has to eat them or they will block the light for their own food supply, and the rest of the ecosystem follows from there. And yes, surface habitats also matter, but their destruction is more localized.
Why does a utility like PG&E fight so hard to hurt solar installation? If I were CEO I'd buy or start a foundry to make solar panels. Then I'd start an installation and service org. People need energy, why should I care where they get it so long as they get it from me? The grid isn't going away so stop trying so desperately to protect that revenue stream.
Why can't oil companies do the same sort of thing? If Shell were smart they'd be making and selling wind turbines, solar panels, inverters, batteries, etc. Use your stupid lobbing arm to get subsidies passed that make the electric utilities pay part of the cost of these products. Instead they're just giving those markets away because they don't know how to do anything beyond oil and jealously try to protect every scrap of oil revenue.
Even ATT focused so much on long-distance revenue and milking people for tiny data pipes they let cable companies and new ISPs waltz in and takeover huge chunks of what had literally been their monopoly business. Bell labs invented VoIP and could have owned that space... but they didn't dare threaten long-distance revenues. Then a few years later competitors evicerated those revenue streams anyway.
It all comes down to a lack of vision and a focus on protecting existing revenue streams. I guess my brain just doesn't work that way. I see change as inevitable so I'd rather try to own a piece of the new market than worry about protecting the old one.
Having worked in the sector, albeit not with Shell, my guess is that the board were advised that offsets increasingly carry massive legal jeopardy, including director’s liability.
This is an interesting summary of the problem:
https://www.clientearth.org/media/nq4jnyww/ce-offsets-legal-...
The technical issue for fossil fuel carbon capture schemes involves conservation of energy. Simply stated, a diesel truck that captures all its emissions as it drives down the road is an obviously implausible scheme, as anyone with even a vague appreciation of how engines work should realize. Clogging the exhaust is the first problem, separating the CO2 (and incomplete combustion products and particulate & inorganic contaminants) from the exhaust stream is the next, and storing the concentrated CO2 is the third.
The only reason these carbon capture systems have been built in practice is to generate a stream of CO2 for enhanced oilfield recovery, a process in which CO2 is injected into aged oil wells because it facilitates recovery of oil from these wells. The CO2/oil mix that comes out is refined as usual and most of the injected CO2 just escapes back to the atmosphere.
The economic fraud all revolves around the technical fact that 'carbon credit' schemes don't offset anything, and in a warming world so-called 'carbon stores' like British Columbian forests have been going up in smoke due to increased wildfires. Similarly cap-and-trade doesn't work; it was originally based on a scheme to clean up sulfur in diesel fuel but the sulfur just ended up in ship bunker fuel (although cities are somewhat cleaner due to the introduction of ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel).
What's particularly egregious about these schemes is the degree of dishonesty demonstrated by their political and industrial promoters - they know they don't work. For example, production of natural gas is booming to record levels at present while the very politicians and executives responsible for the boom are running around proclaiming how concerned they are about climate and running ads stating their dedication to net-zero. Similarly, even if some coal plants are retired in the US, exports of coal to Asia are rising and production is barely falling.
The fact is there's not a single major fossil fuel producing country or corporation on the planet that has any intention of shutting down production in the forseeable future. This is why countries like China, that have to import most of their fossil fuel, are so far ahead in renewable energy production and technology.
Perhaps now they will report their true carbon emissions.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/24/carbon-c...
We should be focused on mitigation strategies and superior technology that wins conversion based on market forces and not government mandates and long term subsidies.
The Green Suicide of the West isn't going to help climate change, and will probably make it worse.
Surely you’re looking at the wrong statistics. Brazil is a leader in renewable energy, with fossil fuel use already on the decline for the last decade.
China is the world’s largest producer of solar and wind power products, and their renewable energy ramp up has only been slowed down by the rest of the world buying up half their output.
The risk to western economies is that they are too slow to transition away from fossil fuels and suffer from their dependence on ever more expensive oil and gas.
China is the world's mass manufacturer. They will happily make whatever they can sell. If the West is demanding solar panels and windmills due to top down energy policy directives China will happily make and sell them.
There is plenty of fossil fuel available and a huge installed base of ICE's around to use them, especially in the developing world and BRICS. If the West stops buying fossil fuels it only makes them cheaper for those who will happily consume them.
The West needs to use its technological edge to develop market winning sustainable technologies and cheap, safe, electricity production. Crippling itself with unrealistic sustainable energy policies is going to be counter productive to climate change solutions.
They have the brains. They should branch out and create a moonshot division that starts to make money and shows stakeholders they can bet on them.
I can not locate the long piece article now but I read a piece from someone that effectively got invited into a Shell (UK) think tank and heard exactly that from some vp/executive at a dinner table.
That they aimed to diversify (think corn/algae based fuels, hydrogen infrastructure, charging networks), but that they ultimately still believed that the public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades.
You think 20 years is enough for this reckoning?
Honestly, I think they’re all going to get away with it with zero repercussion. If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.
Suppose for a moment that I completely agree with you on all points of substance. Even then, I would have to tell you that corporations are designed (not metaphorically, but literally designed) to deflect and shield liability. There never is anyone to be held accountable, because everyone who acts is an employee, and the ownership is divided among millions of people, through many layers of misdirection. None of whom make any decisions.
Unless you were careful, and if you have a 401K, you yourself may in fact be part owner. Or owner of an owner of an owner of an owner. Should you be held accountable?
You can't arrest a corporation. You can't put it in a holding cell overnight. You can't sentence it to prison for 10 years. You definitely can't give it the death penalty and execute it. And it's no accident this is the case. The major (and perhaps only real) difference between a corporation and simpler business customs is that the corporation is this magical wall between the owner and the business that can't usually be breached. If the business goes bankrupt, no one can seize the businessman's home as collateral. That's what a corporation is for. You live in a society that, however upset it might be over climate change, isn't upset at all over this "design". They like it. They revel in it. And it's not going away.
> If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.
But that's already true from a pragmatic standpoint. Even the CEO now, he was hired in a few years ago, He's just some schlub taking the jobs he knows how to do, without any real power to change what you want. If he tried, they'd fire him and get another. The people who set the ball rolling made sure of that. And even they aren't guilty in any real way, either, unless you want to pretend that someone in the early 1900s should have known better.
75% of new electricity production is renewable. 10% of new car sales are EV's. A large fraction of new home heating installations are heat pumps. The three largest hydrocarbon demands are transitioning. That's going to have a meaningful effect on demand. It'll take decades to get anywhere close to zeroing demand, but it's going to have an effect on the margin quite quickly.
Can the companies & countries addicted to massive oil profits cut production quickly enough to stabilize prices? OPEC is trying but they're only a small and shrinking fraction of production and the gains from defection are so large...
I also think as the climate becomes more and more inhospitable, that 40% number will continue to decrease.
Maybe 40 percent is still pro big oil but they don't deny the causal link.
I'm pro big oil because I still drive a gas car. In that sense if you use big oil products you are a supporter. I would put supporters at over waaaaay over 40 percent. 95% is a better estimate.
20 years minus the latency inherent to the system. If I recall correctly the latency from "stopping to emit CO2" to "starting to see effects" is estimated to be 13 years.
It is the most long term outlook you can get. What's more important?a future where my children are billionaires or a future with slightly less global warming? Shell is not the only source of global warming on this earth.
You need to think in terms of human scale choices. Not just simplistic right or wrong choices. If we were that ceo... You, I and all of us maximize our benefits and make the most rational and most logical choice by destroying the environment.
It's the tragedy of the commons pushed to the maximum extreme. I make a shit load of money participating in the destruction of the commons. We'd all be lying to ourselves if we didn't make that choice.
If you think about it from the corporate perspective it also makes sense. The company is heading towards a wall. Not just environment pressures, but a future where oil is dry. We are running out. In the face of an inevitable end what is the best most rational choice? It's obvious.
Elinor Ostrom has written an excellent book called "Governing the Commons," and she was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work. I recommend it.
Big oil and big tobacco share a strategy of promoting false skepticism, shifting blame to consumers, using the legal system to harass and intimidate scientists, and lobbying to get support from elected representatives. Big oil is of course bigger, and the entanglement with politics, jobs and other companies in the private sector is much stronger.
These issues are widely documented, and the books that climate scientist Michael Mann wrote were eye opening to me.
The only sensible exit is to legislate at scale. These companies will not self regulate. The lag between cause and effect makes this extremely dangerous. A heavy carbon tax is an obvious way to do it.
1. Spin off green energy products into their own company. 2. Pour money from oil business into Green energy. 3. When reckoning comes for gas, they let the oil biz take the fall, but the fall won't be much as they will have nearly bankrupted it already.
Their great grandchildren will be able to comfortably inhabit it alright, that's all that matters to them, at the very best.
This also points to the problem with renewables from the capital viewpoint: they're just not as profitable, as you can't sell sunlight and wind or create artificial supply restrictions to jack up prices (which is the historical economic story of the oil & gas industry over most of the 20th century).
- Deny the existence of the problem.
- Pay for others to join the denialist movement.
- Pay others to say that individuals should fix the problem, not the company.
- If they cannot deny anymore, promise they will certainly do something in the future.
- When the future arrives, say they couldn't do anything for financial reasons.
- Finally, say that the harm is already done, and nothing else can be done about it (we already see this happening).
Its not so much they are doing this for profits; which of course they are, but society as a whole very much needs them to continue to do so in order to assure our continued existence in our current form.
- Convince weak minded but important influencers that there's no problem,
by forming "real" friendships (no bribes),
so they in turn sincerely honestly spread the manipulation themselves.
(Ive seen that & read that Putin uses this against the US and EU, and it apparently works great, but that's off topic)
I think a lot of people feel that.
Personally, I think we may more or less have forgotten about "Global Warming" in 20 years, just like we forgot about the "Ozone Layer" or "Acid Rain".
If AI continues at anything resembling the current pace for another decade or two , there may be so much disruption, that Global Warming seems quite insignificant to most people.
You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920.
8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.
The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food.
We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels.
It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007.
> Average life expectancy has increased because child mortality is down, do we stop medical research?
You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920.
> Great. Let's keep investing in mitigation AND prevention. It seems to work!
8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.
> Climate change is not just global WARMING.
The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food.
> At the cost of loss of biodiversity. We don't just need green, but diverse green.
We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels.
> Agreed. (Surprise!) But I'd prefer to see fossil used for industry and not energy. Renewable & nuclear should be sufficient.
It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007.
> Agreed. Moving up people on Maslow's hierarchy also causes them to need to have less kids (in a sane environment with a good social safety net for old age) which should stabilise the population by 2060.
Wow, HVAC is an amazing technology.
The difference is that an existential climate crisis it just isn't treated by our leaders with the same importance as a good old fashioned war.
I’ve dramatically reduced my personal energy usage, I don’t eat animal products, my family has found ways to generate remarkably little garbage, and other “nice” things, but it’s pretty much meaningless. It’s all theatre compared to the damage we do with our car, jobs, community and provincial infrastructure we depend on, etc.
I feel like I’m willing to change my life, and I have already I guess. I’m just not willing to give up my livelihood when it means so little in the bigger picture. I’m no different from someone working on an oil rig or forestry or whatever. What I do looks nicer, but my rationale is no different.
It all takes work so you have to brace yourself to sacrifice your free time and balance everything. It's not easy, but there are countless people already trying to do it.
Why not talk to your employer about a step in that direction, given that solar panels are typically profitable within a handful of years for an average household, let alone if you can 100% offset the kWh generated because all the energy can be used in-house?
Evil triumphs when ‘good men’s’ efforts fail.
Climate change represents an inherent risk to humanity, but some climate change mitigation strategies represent a risk to short-term profit incentives.
We are starting to see economic agitation globally as institutions everywhere begin to question the logic of our systems.
This and other factors has led us to a multi-polar world, which is itself creating new problems that inhibit global synchronisation on this issue.
It is a planetary scale problem. It needs a planetary scale solution.
I moved to a location that is not going to see negatives from climate change. Even if your location isn't great, just work on what you can do. Stop consuming junk on Amazon and start freecycling in your neighborhood. Spend more money to buy goods that have a lower environmental impact. If you own a home, there's a lot you can do to improve the environment. Compost, install rain barrels, maybe solar panels, use native landscaping, plant more trees that will provide shade.
The real tragedy is that a fair amount of this change would make people's lives better.
For example, more walkable human scale communities, less combustion in vehicles and homes, more comfortable, healthier, and cheaper to operate homes, reduced air pollution for communities in the vicinity of power plants and industrial facilities.
But on the other hand, yes smaller houses and cars, less meat, etc are hard to adjust to.
> Barring some of unforeseen technical miracle the next 20-30 years are going to get increasingly grim.
Disagree on that. The technologies we need are all pretty ready or close. It's about bending cost curves and the rate of deployment.
I’m personally quite optimistic, because I’ve already made most of the necessary adjustments, and it wasn’t very hard at all.
Unfortunately this future is inline with the the pessimistic viewpoint.
It's not about pessimism or optimism in the end. It's about logic. He's right. It's done. Likely the worst case scenario for global warming will play out. We already crossed the permanent threshold.
The above is my mockery of how I expect we will in 40 years
If I change my own behavior but everyone doesn't then my actions are negligible.
Rationally my best course of action is to not change.
Remember it is each individual acting extremely rationally and logically that in the end contributes to global warming in aggregate. That is why it's so hard to reverse this. The tragedy of the commons.
So we don’t have to change we live, we just have to change the way we generate our energy.
But like you say, it is appropriate to blame the producers for hiding what they knew about the greenhouse effect and well-funded lobbying and propaganda campaigns to deny and minimize it.
An honest corporation that was just acting to serve the needs of the people wouldn't do something like fight to reduce the exxon valdez spill fine by 100x or raise a fit when regulatory agencies mandate generation shifting.
Because 90% of the population would die.
Then why do journalists investifating recycling sham, oil spills, etc. frequently end up dead or in prison?
This has bothered me since I was a child and drove by a landfill and realized just how much trash we produce. I met someone that went a month without using one time use plastic and she couldn’t really avoid it. It’s everywhere.
Megacorps have a tremendous amount of power in our political system and that makes it very very very difficult to hold people to account for anything.
and a more green planet than a century ago
and far fewer people in poverty
all lead you to believe it's becoming uninhabitable?
Perhaps because of all the chemical-induced algae blooms turning previously blue water into murky green?
Do you think you can survive if the biosphere is gone?
Except there are limits which the demand, for the most part, can't overcome.
> Im lumping in things like direct air capture, bioenergy carbon capture and storage,
All of these things are energy intensive, aren't they? So as energy becomes more expensive, so do they. Demand never gets quite so high that it's worth it to pay for this, because the price is always rising. There's another alternative in such situations... "just don't buy carbon offsets". The PR hit's cheaper after all.
Just look at the greenhouse gas compensation airliners offer for an example of what Shell could reasonably have been up to.
I may also have had a classmate that worked at Shell and put on a really good show of how they're not all evil but also spending <insert objectively huge number> on good things. The last strand of that is severed now at least...
We are actually running out. What comes next after shale?
The earth as well as the value of their own companies.
Go ask some people in developing countries if they think they should sacrifice economic growth for climate change. The answer is going to be overwhelmingly no. The developing world also has the majority of the world’s population, so the global consensus actually belongs to them, not us.
Case in point: the fabricated idea that Iraq had chemical weapons that could hit western Europe. There wasn't a lot of debate on whether or not the western world was willing to eliminate the threat if it existed.
(note, I'm not trying to turn this into a discussion of the fabricated information, simply using it as an example that war is always on the table if a country feels its existence is in danger).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-023-03518-z
How much net real harm to humanity do you think global warming causes today? (If we ingnore psychological harm caused mostly by the scare tactics used to prevent it)
According to this article, total excess mortality from cold weather is still an order of magnitude higher than from hot weather:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
As the world has been warming over the last decades, mortality from cold weather has been declining faster than the mortality from warm weather has increased.
This is from Europe, but prior studies have been conducted that produce the same results globally:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
> more like it's a non-issue now
So my claim is that global warming is also in reality a non-issue right now, even though it could in theory become a big issue in about 100-200 years, if we don't do anything.
I think the reason why Global Warming gets so much attention right now, is partly that we have few other serious issues to worry about right now, and partly because some groups have chosen to put it on the agenda.
Few people alive today actually remember WW2, and even the Cold War and the Nuclear Scare is becoming a distant memory.
So my prediction is NOT that the real threat of Global Warming will necesarily go away, but rather that something (like AGI) will appear that makes it seem insignificant by comparison.
(That's why I try to call it climate change instead.)
What you think is a harsh fine, even "everything they own" is nothing more than the cost of doing business. Even if you seize a few tens of billions of dollars, what's that compared to the trillions they've earned and paid out as dividends over the last century?
> For some reason police can do it to the poor,
Which is an interesting discussion if you wanted to have it, but is not even slightly relevant to this one.
What do you expect the police to do with oil rigs and tanker fleets and refineries and gas stations? What do you expect them to do with office buildings filled with conference rooms and thousand dollar conference room chairs?
Do you want to pile it into a big bonfire and burn it ironically? Do you put it in a landfill and bulldoze them under the ground? Do you want to sell that stuff on Craigslist yard-sale style for the next 60 years at a penny on the dollar?
Not to mention now you've put a 100,000 people out of work, probably more. I guess making them starve because they took a gas station job is justice in your mind.
> but their possessions doesn't have same rights as they do. So take it all away.
The interesting thing about "just fuck their rights" apoplectic outbursts like yours is, someone's likely to take you up on it someday. You're just likely to be the target more than whoever it is you think you hate.
The sad fact is that none of this can ever be fixed until some large fraction of humanity understands the problem. I've done my part, but you insist on remaining ignorant.
> What do you expect them to do with office buildings filled with conference rooms and thousand dollar conference room chairs?
Turn them into public housing, public spaces, publicly funded cafeterias, etc.
> Not to mention now you've put a 100,000 people out of work, probably more. I guess making them starve
Now with the excess in housing and all these public spaces and cafeterias, maybe it wont be as necessary for people to hang on to fulltime work.
The idea that we can only mitigate is insane. Yes we've already signed up for a lot of pain as a civilization, but as long we keep burning fossil fuels we are looking at an increasingly worse future.
It's not like a smoker who has gotten lung cancer, where the best we can do is try to ease the pain, and more smoking won't really matter.
The biggest first step in preventing the worse case is to be able to point to an established oil field and say "that will never be extracted, and will remain in the earth for at least a 1000 years."
Every ton of carbon we can keep in the ground that way, the better of our future, even if that future is already slated to be bad.
Personally, I feel that the solution is to gradually raise the tax rate on fossil fuels in order to disincentives their use and incentivize the production of alternatives. We've done this for cigarettes and it has worked. However, you will probably have the vaping equivalent of petrol that will come out and gain more marketshare.
The second solution is to make energy so cheap and abundant that petrol becomes unattractive.
To massively and suddenly restrict petrol use is a great way to start riots and ensure that your government will either be overthrown or has to descend into tyranny.
A shock-therapy style stop to fossil fuel extraction will kill millions of people through starvation, economic collapse and insufficient heating in winter. Depending how shocking the shock therapy is it could be billions.
I believe that's electric SUVs and solar roofs on single family homes :D
If you look at the Brent Crude (oil) price chart and zoom out so you can see the last 10 years it's definitely not showing any sign of a long-term downward trend.
> Its not so much they are doing this for profits
Funding a massive climate change denial movement in the US for decades, consequently eating up our limited window of time to make the kinds of societal changes to avoid the worst consequences of climate change is very much an "oil company issue" that is done exclusively for profit.
The same way the best way to tackle crime is through better education for the people, getting the existing people out of poverty might be the single best thing we can do to have them realize the impact, reproduce less, and contribute to a solution. I also think this way ends up being pragmatic because it doesn't require "so we change everyone's minds" as step 1.
Water is also plant food, but that's not a helpful piece of information if you're in a flood. The world is releasing 97 million barrels of gasoline into the atmosphere per day.
Like, with just the corporate headquarters of Shell, you've somehow created an excess in housing?
> maybe it wont be as necessary for people to hang on to fulltime work.
... To the point that they won't have to work for a living?!
It very likely could, and I'd happily pay for it. Like, my Mac Studio with an M2 Max in it probably took, all said, and absurd about of resources to create... But it only cost me $3k or something. Well, if it works as long as it should, it'll easily help me earn over half a million dollars. I'd rather pay far more for the computer and cover the expenses of the externalities of its production, but I don't have the choice.
Otherwise, a lot of the energy used in the production could be sustainably produced, but it's not incentivized enough in the countries (or any countries, I suppose) in order for that to occur.
Perhaps I could make improvements by switching to different computers. I know the framework offers opportunities to reuse the same chassis such you can use mostly-the-same hardware for a very long time, and that could be the right path forward. I love the philosophy.
As for the driving issue, that's very hard to overcome. I personally ride an electric bike just about all the time, but at the moment I'm on vacation in Whistler, BC, having driven through 2 full tanks of gas so far on my way from Victoria, to Squamish, now Whistler, and all the little stops in between. My Toyota Highlander produces more pollution than any other single thing in my life. My wife drives it for work and we both regret the purchase quite a bit. Yet, something electric would take a very long time to "break even" on the footprint before improving on our situation, even with how clean our electricity is here in BC. I need to do more research to understand how I could purchase my way out of this problem.
IIRC the break even point when powered by renewable energy was about 60k kilometers.
Depending on where you live and your driving habits that could be seen as a lot, but considering that after those ~40k miles every mile can be considered 'clean' I don't think it's all that bad.
Edit:
Source in Dutch: http://publications.tno.nl/publication/34616575/gS20vf/TNO-2...
TL;DR: Assuming a car lifespan of 220k km (136k miles) and including emissions for fabrication, repairs, etc. emissions will be 70% lower for an electric vehicle powered by renewables. When powered by non-renewable energy it's still 30% less total emissions than a regular petrol car. Other than that you also emit less of various other pollutants. And (personal opinion alert) it's just a way nicer drive ;-)
Of course, replacing a fossil car that is still nearly new is the greater evil. I fully support driving on gasoline if that's genuinely the better thing to do.
What one can do in the meantime is use one of the available options to suck the CO2 back out of the air. It's expensive, but if you say you're happy to pay the premium given your income if only there were options, well, that's an option, and can be applied to the computer purchase or electricity production, too. It does get prohibitively expensive when including every emission, but it's not all or nothing, and also, with solar panels reducing the electricity need, a green energy provider covering the grid demand (that's the best one can reasonably do after solar panels), etc., it should be possible to reduce the need for carbon capture quite a bit already today, and more in the future as more industries greenify
Because the free market is not willing to bear the risks - even when you ignore the whole "nuclear waste" and "meltdown" part. The construction costs are extremely high and basically guaranteed to wildly exceed initial estimates, while electricity price is highly volatile.
The only way companies are interested in building reactors is by having a guaranteed government subsidy. For example, Sizewell C in the UK has negotiated a guaranteed electricity price of £119 / MWh. The long-term electricity spot price in the UK for 2013-2021 is closer to £70, so taxpayers have to pay an additional £49 / MWh in subsidies. Good luck selling that to the nuclear-skeptic taxpayers.
Because of environmentalists like Green Peace, Sierra Club etc.
The high price of oil is a huge drag on economy, with every spike causing inflation and reducing economic growth.
The USA has already developed technology needed, and renewables are now the cheapest energy source. The countries that scale them up quickly will enjoy smooth economic growth and cheaper energy than ever in history, and the countries that keep using oil will stagnate.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2013.012...
Everyone still has to make their living, and they have to do it inside the elites construction of the market.
The elites are at fault as much as you and I are at fault. The story of oil is a human crisis caused by humanity itself. We like to blame specific groups but that's just not reality.
The tragedy arises in aggregate. When every industry contributes negligible amounts at the same time the aggregate contribution is no longer negligible. Rational individual action leads to total destruction.
Yeah we are all guilty. Even when we contribute negligible amounts.
What? No.
You need to look at it by sub industries in industries. That's more closer to the logical perspective people are acting on.
Computing infrastructure is one thing, but then there's also the enormous waste footprint of electronics in general. So many billions of people are now cycling through devices, and our recycling story is disturbingly poor. My job is quite close to this problem, whether it directly supports it or not. My livelihood more or less depends on humanity using connected devices, so this problem works in my favour (so to speak).
At what point do we blame ourselves to increasing fossil fuel usage, even in the what, past 5 years?
But I also think that the effect of even a megamillionaire who takes a private jet everywhere is dwarfed by the effect of corporate leadership, lobbying, and legal teams who successfully undo regulation via the courts and legislatures so that they can make more profits.
So I buy shrimp that was grown locally.
Then I read up that shrimps were transported to the other side of the world, peeled there, and shipped back, travelled 20,000 miles, before landong on my plate.
I buy canned pairs, and turns out the same story. What am I suppose to do, starve?
The capitalist machine prioritises fictitious resource of money, over real resource of oil. It wastes huge amount of enegy just to take advantage of a poor country's low wages.
I drive an ebike to work. You can go vegan, quit heating your house, take cold showers, none of it will make any difference if the industry does not change it's practices.
Let’s partner with oil companies to collectively solve carbon capture at planet scale? They get to keep functioning, citizens & government helps with subsidization and research programs. Put a time limit on progress and penalize the oil companies by making fines exponentially rise by time if possible and unmet. A select subcommittee can oversee the process and politicians can coordinate partnerships with other countries.
You need BOTH the carrot AND the stick to get behaviors to change.
And yes, you can build pretty tall structures out of CLT, but there's still smaller than what you can build with steel and concrete. The tallest one built that I know of is 25 stories. But at least 6 or so of those floors are all concrete+steel, and it still uses concrete+steel emergency stairwells.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/delivering-mission/apply/w...
But what is the foundation made from? What do you think the elevator shafts are made from? Its not like its 100% wood. I would like to see more CLT construction, and modern building codes are allowing taller and larger stick construction as well, but arguing that steel and concrete aren't necessary is ignoring all the rest of the things supporting that structure along with all the other things that still need steel and concrete. How did all the building materials arrive at the site? What harvested the wood? What were the machines making the CLT made out of? What are the fireproof stairwells usually made out of? Steel and concrete.
We'll probably see more and more construction which looks like this, where some CLT offsets some concrete and steel, but chances are the whole building isn't entirely wood:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/styles/fs_wysiwy...
Using modern materials and building codes can let us reduce our usage of things like steel and concrete for more buildings, but its not going to fully eliminate their usage in our world.
https://www.geoengineer.org/education/ground-improvement/lim...
As for the rest, I was referring to buildings. I don't think anything is so worthy of being built that wrecking the environment is a fair trade. Railways are an honourable exception, since they displace (far more wasteful) cars. Light rail is especially good for this.
The fact is that we need to question what we build, as well as the materials used to build it.
In fact who is actually causing emissions? They sell products and it's the end users who burn the product.
Every gallon of oil you use is equivalent to a democratic vote for oil ... we all can choose to vote in the other direction right now... but we don't.
Not Just Bikes has a good video on the propaganda car companies were pushing in the 50s here, which played a large part in creating the unprecented design of suburban America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n94-_yE4IeU&t=1060s
Ostrom didn't debunk the tragedy of the commons. She merely suggests a framework that would avoid it, which has never been tested at the scale of 7 billion people trying to solve global warming.
And yeah, sure I'm not here to defend Mao's policies. But an authoritarian state is not at all related to a collective of people managing resources, so I'm not sure why you're even bringing it up?
What's your vision of a better society?
That doesn't really change that there used to be a lot of forest and larger animals that could have supported a more fulfilling diet that were extinct by the time the Europeans arrived. If society as we know it collapses due to climate change, the people who do survive would also "practice resiliency, cooperation, and perhaps even a degree of environmental stewardship."
> But an authoritarian state is not at all related to a collective of people managing resources
Mao didn't exactly have the resources to enforce a 1984 style or even North Korean style authoritarianism. The authoritarianism was very much enforced by a collective of people. People genuinely wanted to support Mao, which is why they hid how terrible his policies were from him and continued their support for him afterwards.
> What's your vision of a better society?
I think overly reductionist ideas like "capitalism bad" and "Mao authoritarian" end up causing problems like the Great Leap Forward did. Any solution to any societal problem requires a deep understanding across multiple domains, which to be fair is what Ostrom suggests. To be clear, I don't think that it's really anyone's fault, but rather most people don't actually care about the issues to put the work into studying or taking action to them in any meaningful capacity.
For some reason, whenI lie to the insurance company, its fraud and I am a criminal.
But when a company lies to me about my environmentally friendly product, it's just business.
> Indeed, making the much bigger model, the GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters, emitted over 550 tons of CO2e while consuming 1,287 MW hours of electricity, per computer scientist Kate Saenko. It’s the same amount of emissions as a single person taking 550 roundtrip flights between New York and San Francisco.
Specifically, I struggle with the interpretation where this is presented as significant amount. To me, training GPT-3 at the cost of about a SINGLE New York-San Francisco return flight is practically negligible. I wonder whether for example at a conference like NeurIPS the carbon cost of all the experiments is exceeded by the carbon cost of participant travel to the conference. My guess is that probably yes.
[1] https://carboncredits.com/how-big-is-the-co2-footprint-of-ai...
The oil supply chain is logistically demanding. Once oil is pumped out of the ground it's got to go somewhere, and once it's there it has to move or be burned, because storing oil gets expensive. What oil producers care about is predictability of demand, price is important but it's secondary to that. If the whole world knows that there's plenty of oil it's much harder to set the price where you want it. If the world thinks oil is a rare and precious commodity the price is natural.
Then again, we missed the window to stop long ago. So why bother anyways, right?
Now that we're developing alternative energy sources, we should start/continue to move away from fossil fuels, but if we try to do it too quickly, the price may be higher than the benefit.
Ultimately, it's a very poor excuse to state that because we can't stop immediately, that we might as well continue digging as much oil as possible out of the ground for burning.
Unfortunately, we're going to have far more gigadeaths when crops fail due to the climate becoming unpredictable and wars over clean water become ubiquitous. It always surprises me that people claim that deaths will result from cleaning up our act when that's a small fraction of the deaths that will be caused by climate catastrophes.
But this has always been the problem with stopping climate change.
We are choosing between lesser, but certain immediate pain vs larger but less certain future pain.
In the 1880s we could have easily stopped climate changed, but been forced to slow growth. The pain would have been minimal for those living, but the probability of extreme catastrophe seemed remote so nothing was done.
As we move forward the probability of extreme catastrophe becomes more certain, but so too does the immediately pain.
I'm curious how you think that the damage of climate change can be worse than this.
Oh, much worse.
First off we, fertilizer or no, we're already facing crop failures in the US [0] and will continue to face even more extreme crop failures [1]. Even if we had unlimited fertilizer we've already signed up for massive famine.
But if you really want to talk about the unmitigated climate change path, which is what happens if we choose not to keep hydrocarbons in the ground, I really recommend reading Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky [2].
He's a respected geologist that makes a compelling case that the vast majority of mass extinction events were caused by rapid rises in CO2.
One of the realistic scenarios we're facing, he argues, is the break down of the AMOC ultimately leading to the oceans becoming anoxic and releasing hydrogen sulfide rather than oxygen. The entire marine ecosystem is essentially wiped out except for some cyanobacteria. The oceans are the foundation of all of our food systems. It would make the planet uninhabitable my most complex life of today. This has happened before in Earth's climate history.
All of the "bad-awful" but not-extinction event scenarios assume that we do not burn all of the fossil fuel reserves currently leased. We are already looking at a grim future, but given that we're rapidly pumping millions of years of stored CO2 into the atmosphere, upper bounds for the damage we can do are tremendous.
0. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/us/kansas-wheat-harvest-d... 1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/4/scientists-warn-of-c... 2. https://www.amazon.com/Under-Green-Sky-Warming-Extinctions/d...
None of these things are necessarily true. In fact from the government stability perspective we've been in an unparalleled period of peace and stability that looks incredibly shaky into the near future.
Any climate commitments go completely out the window when conflict breaks out between nations.
The argument wasn't that they're unconstitutional, it's that they weren't authorized by Congress. To have the law you have to actually pass the law.
But the argument was bullshit. Major Questions Doctrine just exists to say "nu uh, that authorization you have from Congress doesn't count" when it is politically expedient. The Clean Air Act exists. Congress passed it. Roberts just thinks that the law shouldn't be able to do anything controversial but there is absolutely nowhere in the Constitution that says that Congress' delegation authority is limited only to uncontroversial things.
It wasn't that either. It was the courts saying that the law Congress passed didn't clearly authorize the EPA to do this, so if Congress wants it they need to say so unambiguously.
Notably this means that to change it doesn't require a constitutional amendment but only an ordinary law, which is not what is generally meant by "unconstitutional".
> The Clean Air Act exists. Congress passed it.
And then the courts interpret it and if Congress doesn't like their interpretation they can pass a new law which is more specific.
> Roberts just thinks that the law shouldn't be able to do anything controversial but there is absolutely nowhere in the Constitution that says that Congress' delegation authority is limited only to uncontroversial things.
There is absolutely nowhere in the Constitution that says that Congress even has delegation authority.
First off, I'm not saying "starting tomorrow now fossil fuels!", I'm saying you must keep fossil fuels in the ground to avoid worst case. And the start of that means you have to identify some fossil fuels that will never be extracted.
> since we have ample time to do so.
I seriously have no idea where you got that impression, but with climate change once you start feeling the effects you're already in the danger zone. We've already signed up for famine and potentially billions dead even if we had zero emissions today.
I do suggest you read up a bit more on the topic. No serious research around climate change would claim we have "ample time".
The bigger question is: how close are we to climate "tipping points". We do know that geologically it seems there are points where positive feedbacks start accelerating climate change rapidly. We just don't know where the line is for those tipping points.
If we seriously want to avoid extinction of the species we should already be starting to strategize a schedule of what fossil fuels reserves we promise to keep in the ground, and what we're going to do about future discoveries.
To be honest, I don't really think we will do this, but if we wanted to survive at all we should start talking about it very seriously.
> crops fail due to the climate becoming unpredictable and wars over clean water become ubiquitous
Currently, we're facing what can become the worst famine in decades because of a single war that was NOT caused by global warming or access to water. Just simple nationalism.
The food supply 50-300 years from now is really hard to predict. If the birth rate stays at current levels, and also reach such levels in the few countries where the birth rate is still high today (mostly Africa), there will be a lot fewer mouths to feed in 2100 than today.
And if the birth rate goes back up, and exponential population growth resumes, no amount of food production will ensure that we never run out.
Right now (or rather, before 2022), the amount of food produced per capita globally, is probably higher than at any time before since the dawn of time.
Thanks in very large parts to fossil fuels used for farm machinery and in fertilizers.
e.g. how is Africa going to have a high birth rate when it'll be largely inhabitable due to the high temperatures?
Also, what famine are you referring to and why does it not feature here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
Anyway, my point was that UNLESS Africa continues to have such birth rates, the population seems to be falling sharply globally in the next century. In other words, the main assumption is that global pupulation is going down, with the Africa part only being a qualifier.
I don't think it's public opinion so much as it is necessity to maintain current standards of living for the next few decades. Renewable energy is still a relatively small fraction of overall energy use, and net global oil consumption has been steadily increasing the past few years (likely to surpass pre-covid levels this year). Our society is still very much addicted to hydrocarbons.
Think generators for an antarctic station that can only use solar in certain months and wind isn't enough (or reliable enough)). Even if efficient electric commercial aviation at scale ever happens, you can bet military jets will still need jet fuel. I'm sure there's many others. Methane for rocket launches?
On top of fuel, there's also the use of some fraction of oil in industrial chemical processes to make lubricants and plastics. There may be other chemical processes that can do it without oil, but they may be too costly (in terms of other extractive processes for ingredients, or in terms of yield, not just energy).
That's a lot, but if we only used oil in the US for the military, we'd still be using 95% less oil, and we'd also still be producing enough oil to have an economy of scale.
In any case, realistically speaking, we aren't coming for oil tomorrow. Instead, we need to come for coal immediately. If it takes us decades each time we cut our oil consumption in half, that's one thing... but the coal, that needs to stop sooner.
I could not disagree with this more. While China is a "developing" country, they are arguably making herculean efforts to move away from oil for transportation. They will drag the developed world along, as they will have built up all of this EV and electric scooter/bike/moped manufacturing capacity with only so much domestic consumption for it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37307619 (China Reaches Peak Gasoline in Milestone for Electric Vehicles)
From the Bloomberg piece:
> Earlier this month, Chinese oil giant Sinopec made a surprise announcement that mostly flew under the radar. It’s now expecting gasoline demand in China to peak this year, two years earlier than its previous outlooks. The main culprit? The surging number of electric vehicles on the road.
> China has been the largest driver of global growth for refined oil products like gasoline and diesel over the last two decades. But EV adoption rates in China are now soaring, with August figures likely to show plug-in vehicles hitting 38% of new passenger-vehicle sales. That’s up from just 6% in 2020 and is starting to materially dent fuel demand.
> Fuel demand in two and three-wheeled vehicles is already in structural decline, with BNEF estimating that 70% of total kilometers traveled by these vehicles already switched over to electric. Fuel demand for cars will be the next to turn, since well over 5% of the passenger-vehicle fleet is now either battery-electric or plug-in hybrid. The internal combustion vehicle fleet is also becoming more efficient due to rising fuel-economy targets.
In only a few third world countries.
It's great. I love the idea too. I would rather we stop driving around machines that belch out dangerous toxins but a mass migration to EVs will be disastrous. The manufacturers are going hybrid...which is a sensible transition. It should get people used to the freedom of producing/collecting their own energy. Hopefully they get addicted to that.
Those are pretty much the same thing.
Even when society wants to shift, the ones in charge say no.
We should have had a governmental mandate requiring companies over a certain size to allow WFH and justify why they can’t do it if they really can’t.
On the plus side we have the greatest effect on politics at the local level, if we get involved.
You can't always get what you want.
Make no mistake, oil will always be needed for many purposes, but some of the big consumption drivers are starting to have price competitive alternatives.
It’s notable that half of all global oil consumption is used on roads.
You can’t turn back the clock on the fact that many of these alternatives now cost less.
And commuter traffic is an obvious easy target for EV automakers, once they move out of more premium segments.
And they are right. There are viable alternatives to gasoline cars now and people still buy gas powered vehicles. Most of Teslas success I think has not been so much due to the hunger for an electric vehicle but because of Tesla's cool factor, performance and design. The rest of the major vehicle manufacturers have essentially failed on the electric vehicle front.
But I don't think it is the majority. Most enjoy the cars for other reasons (lack of vibration, high torque, reduced gas station visits, lower operating cost and burden, cabin overheat protection, dog mode, preconditioning, etc).
Even among the environmental types, that often ends up being more of a fringe benefit.
My first thought as well.
Yes, Congress can pass a new law. That doesn't make the supreme court's decision absolutely fucking rank idiocy based entirely in political goals covered in the thinnest veneer of jurisprudence.
Yes, Gorsuch thinks that Congress can't delegate at all and basically all execute agencies should be destroyed. We know. He'll ride out climate change in a mansion.
It kind of does. Your version would make any interpretation of the law a constitutional question. The plaintiff in a civil case claims they're entitled to damages but the court found their argument unconstitutional because it's Congress and not plaintiffs who make the law?
> That doesn't make the supreme court's decision absolutely fucking rank idiocy based entirely in political goals covered in the thinnest veneer of jurisprudence.
It feels pretty consistent with a "separation of powers" interpretation of how laws get made. Do you really think they come to a different result if it was Trump's EPA saying they had to replace renewables with "reliable" generation methods over whatever pretext? And wouldn't that be the result you want?
> Yes, Gorsuch thinks that Congress can't delegate at all and basically all execute agencies should be destroyed. We know. He'll ride out climate change in a mansion.
They could exist without making laws. Agency drafts a bill, proposes it to Congress, Congress votes on it. It's democratic.
It seems like people have forgotten how to compromise. You want a climate change bill, Republicans don't. Republicans want school vouchers, or to reduce the number of federal employees, or immigration reform, or lower taxes. You give them something they want, you get something you want.
I don't think that's true. Consider a case that is doing statutory interpretation to resolve a conflict between two federal laws. There is no question about the constitutional authority of Congress or any other body here.
> Do you really think they come to a different result if it was Trump's EPA saying they had to replace renewables with "reliable" generation methods over whatever pretext?
Yes. The Supreme Court is a political body, like any other. Notably, West Virginia v EPA took on a regulation that had already been reversed by the Trump administration.
> It seems like people have forgotten how to compromise. You want a climate change bill, Republicans don't.
And yet, the Clean Air Act exists. Congress could edit it or repeal it if they wanted.
> China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Zimbabwe were the only countries that both added new coal plants and announced new projects. China accounted for 92% of all new coal project announcements.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/coal-burning-capacity-cli...
And if per capita consumption can go down in the 2010's when we had negligible amounts of wind, solar, EV's and heat pumps, what'll it do in the 2020's when we have non-negligible amounts of wind, solar, EV's and heat pumps?
There was no question about the constitutional authority of Congress in the other case. They were interpreting the Clean Air act and concluded it didn't enable the EPA to do this.
> Yes. The Supreme Court is a political body, like any other.
They generally try to avoid political issues and punt them to the elected branches.
> Notably, West Virginia v EPA took on a regulation that had already been reversed by the Trump administration.
'The case was not rendered moot when the Biden administration took over in 2020, as the EPA under the Biden administration stated their inclination to include "outside the fence line" controls, making the case still relevant to the authority the EPA had in interpreting their Congressional charter.' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA)
> And yet, the Clean Air Act exists. Congress could edit it or repeal it if they wanted.
You keep saying "the Clean Air Act exists" but the question is what it authorizes the EPA to do.
They could pretty easily impose costs on fossil fuel generators that make them uncompetitive and thereby cause a switch to other generation methods, but that would raise energy costs for consumers in the meantime, which would be unpopular. So they wanted to do something else, but the something else wasn't a thing the law authorized the EPA to do, so if you want that you need to change the law.
https://insideevs.com/news/675163/norway-plugin-car-sales-ju...
The USA was at 14% last year and could hit 18% this year.
https://insideevs.com/news/675163/norway-plugin-car-sales-ju...
Though I do admit, electric is less compelling where the electric grid is unreliable.
Are you talking about China? I think they're considered a second-world country, as they were somewhat aligned with the USSR.
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/08/02/38-plugin-vehicle-marke...
Keep in mind that most countries are trying to electrify most parts of the economy, so we not only need to decarbonize the current electrical supply, but possibly 2-3 times that, if we are to replace NG for heating, steel and chemical industries, fertilizers and so on.
Keep in mind that even if the technology for producing windmills and batteries go down a lot, we still need a lot of new mining capacity to even have enough raw materials to produce those items. That alone could take 10-15 years to build out.
As long as you only consume it while the Sun is shinning, at the place of generation. This set of restrictions is allowing enough for a surprisingly large set of industrial applications (anything where energy costs are larger than capital ones).
In fact, we are not far from that. Solar is already a few times cheaper than the grid energy on those conditions.
That was what I objected to.
And if the average price falls by 90%, there number of industrial application where it would make sense to consume only part of the day, drops by a lot.
The calculation wasn't straightforward though. And varies widely by locale.
EV mileage is reported in eMPG. Which means, "The miles you get when you charge the battery with the same energy as is in a mile of gasoline." The problem is that to deliver that much to the battery, you have losses at the charger, losses in the grid, and losses during power generation. None of which are counted in that figure. If your electric car is running off of a coal power plant, that 120 eMPG Tesla can easily perform about like a 30 MPG Camry. But as soon as you have a significant fraction of your grid being generated by renewables, now the electric car is running on a fraction of the CO2 emissions of the gas car.
All these needs to be cut down and EV won't help us. People need to be able to reach safely schools, workplaces, shops, restaurants by foot or by bike regardless of their age and fitness level.
What we help us is better infrastructure for non motorized vehicles, better public transport (even if they are not financially profitable), walkable spaces, security (with a density of human presence making sure we are safe, not useless cameras), transforming suburbs, commercial and social areas so there is no physical separation anymore between people and where they need/want to go and spend time, effectively bringing back the village/small town paradigm.
EV goes way way way way down the list and we should focus first on EV for public transport and transportation of good rather than personnal toys and vanity possession.