No, a very, very substantial proportion of the dependencies are specifically on cheap, energy-dense liquid fuel like diesel or kerosene.
That’s 30% for transport, almost all of which is strictly dependent on diesel, gasoline, and kerosene. “But electric vehicles!” OK, but how quickly can we feasibly turn over the current fleet of diesel and gasoline fueled vehicles into EVs? Doing so involves mining, smelting, and manufacturing – maybe those could all be electrified, but how quickly can we feasibly swap out that infrastructure? And until we do swap out that infrastructure, we are using more and more fossil fuels to try to reduce our fossil fuel usage. Besides that, go ahead and show me your plans for an electrified jet engine. A big chunk of that 30% is air travel, and there is just no way to cut kerosene out of that application. It’s unlikely a new discovery in jet engine technology is going to change that after 70 years of developing jet engine technology.
Also, a fair chunk of the “industry” wedge is dependent on cheap, energy-dense liquid fuel. Mining equipment all uses diesel. It cannot be easily electrified. The same fleet turnover and embodied energy concerns apply here.
Right, but now your EROEI for those fuels are negative because you’re using more energy than you’re getting out. Doing this economically requires huge quantities of incredibly cheap energy if we’re going to implement it without drastically hamstringing the economy (to the point where no manufacturing is happening whatsoever so all of this is moot).
Even if I agree that, in principle, all these problems can be resolved (solar satellites? controlled fusion? putting faerie creature in hamster wheels?), there’s still the question of how we get from where we are to that theoretical energy utopia. The blog Do the Math used the term “energy trap” to talk about how we have to use incredible amounts of (fossil fuel) energy to create a non-fossil fuel-based energy infrastructure. It didn’t go too much into the political, economic, and social difficulties of doing so, but they are considerable.
When you look at the problem in the abstract and say, “oh, we just need X amount of energy” the problem looks pretty tractable. But when you drill down into the details in terms of what kinds of energy at what density and in what form are needed where and when, the problem starts to look a lot less tractable. It gets even worse when you take into account how energy and the economy interact. Expensive energy (all renewables are expensive) acts as friction on the economy because it increases the costs for everything. From my view, fossil fuels are already too expensive to extract to maintain economic growth (hence why debt has increased astronomically since 2008 with only very anemic 2%ish growth as a result, much of which might be fake growth anyway), and since renewables are all even more expensive than that, there seems to me no way to switch over – even incrementally – without causing a massive global depression.
I’m very eager to see analyses to prove me wrong because I would rather not spend most of my life living through a hellish decline of industrial civilization. But pointing out to me the really, really obvious fact that you can substitute one form of energy for another in specific and limited situations like trading gasoline-powered cars for EVs is not going to satisfy that desire.
