Yes, you’re right, I was being way too general in the claim. All energy needs covered with renewables…not yet. In fact, Denmark seems to have fallen behind their previous pinnacle (although still doing quite well).
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You might want to look into EROEI and life cycle analyses – even those tend to be too generous to renewables… Denmark relies on its neighbors to balance its intermittent production, and all energy production relies on mining, refining, manufacturing, and transport that is all heavily reliant on fossil fuels. The production of renewable energy depends on a vast technical infrastructure that is almost entirely predicated on the use of fossil fuels. The economics of renewables and the subsidies for them tend to obscure a lot of the true costs, and almost all the analyses showing the price parity between solar and whatever else ignore these inconvenient facts.
This isn’t even getting into the problems involved in the fact that the earth’s food supply is also predicated on the use of large amounts of fossil fuels through the creation of synthetic fertilizers and the fact that a significant proportion of the world’s food supply (especially the stuff that gets into the cities) is produced on highly mechanized farms that use a lot of fossil fuels.
This is one thing our new friend has right: the promise of renewables is greatly exaggerated. I don’t find that sort of exaggeration much more ethical than climate denialism.
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Another way of looking at this is that these energy companies aren’t doing battle with “renewables,” they’re fighting energy resources that scale and can be decentralized.
Most people will never have the option of going “off-grid” or supporting their energy consumption with a scaled-down natural gas plant, a personal coal mine, or My Lil’ Nuke. These energy resources demand centralized distribution and a massive Beast of No Nation to run it. There are many Corpo-Global-Gummintal-Military-Energy-Beasts working on centralized wind and solar farms, but they live in horror of the Energy Appliance that will reduce them to the status of the Ice Delivery Guy eventually and inevitably.
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That’s a usefully evocative image: thanks!
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It’s already been mentioned, but I think the point deserves to stand on its own: Coal is already massively subsidized if you factor in the environmental and health damage it does.
How much would it cost today to build a coal plant that has the same impact on greenhouse gasses and toxic side-effects as wind? The answer is $infinite, because there is no current technology that can fully contain and sequester the exhaust.
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It’s got cooties.
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In my mind at least, @Matthew_Edwards is a very nice example of a paid internet commenter. I’m going to bookmark this discussion for future reference. I guess the Kochs haven’t gotten the memo that distraction is the preferred strategy over combative arguing nowadays.
Update: you can read 1,615 other comments by @Matthew_Edwards at https://disqus.com/by/disqus_N40uatrSwT/. Normally he just sneers at the libtards, the sustained argumentation you see here is unusual for him. I take it back, I doubt he is getting paid.
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I may have missed something, but was there a particular post that strongly suggested “paid astroturfer” rather than “destructively ignorant fool”?
There ain’t no shortage of climate-denial lemmings, but most of 'em are doing it volunteer. I’d expect a paid shill to be more competent.
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kind of like why assume malice when stupidity will cover the facts?
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But almost all of the dependencies on fossil fuels are really a dependency on energy. Even the chemical products of oil can be synthesized from other substances. For sure, we aren’t close to 100% reliance on renewables yet, but the fact that the guy who drives to the solar power plant doesn’t use a solar charged Tesla is more of a historical thing than something baked into the system.
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For what its worth I think this has always been the subtext behind arguments for and against fission power. It came down to big centralized infrastructure vs individual freedom.
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It’s an interesting question. We know a lot about China forum manipulation thanks to the King et al. paper. The 50c who are organized and paid use distraction, but there are also volunteer groups (the “bring your own grainers” and “little red flowers”, believed to be unorganized by the regime) who are combative arguers.
Which is @Matthew_Edwards? The posts don’t indicate one way or another. He claims to be from Wyoming, if the originating IP is from that state that would be suggestive that he is sincere. Of course IPs can be spoofed or he could be using Tor.
I lean towards paid because his posts read like they are cut and pasted from focus-grouped coal company talking points. We’ll never know, though.
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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.
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Nobody needs to do that. That’s an invented, unnecessary and basically meaningless scenario.
I’ll guesstimate it should take about two years to convert all the diesels to 100% renewable agriculturally derived fuels. Since that’s what Dr. Diesel intended them to run on… and people have been doing the reconversion on shoestring budgets for decades. It’s pretty close to an afternoon project.
Biologically derived gasoline is also possible, but gas cars and equipment are already phasing out. I have an electric tractor, an electric car, a hybrid car, and a gasoline fueled van. The oldest is the electric tractor, but second eldest is the gas van. Well maintained electric vehicles fundamentally pay for themselves in fuel savings, so it’s strictly front-loaded cost that is the barrier to adoption.
Well, everybody always says whatever they don’t want to do will wreck the economy. In this case, it’s kind of the opposite of the truth; as you pointed out yourself, maintaining the non-renewable energy power structure is exactly what’s killing our economy.
There’s no need to analyze the failings of a straw man. The scenario you envision - overnight conversion of heavy equipment and transportation to electric propulsion - is a movie plot, not a valid strategy. We don’t need to do it.
I’m speaking from considerable experience. The number of people who told me I was wrong and crazy for buying into hybrids and EVs was easily ten times the number of those who were supportive. But economically, I’ve been laughing my way to the bank!
I drive my plug-in hybrid over 25 miles a day, and I fill the tank once a month, whether it needs it or not. My electric tractor snowplows the street for 50¢ of electricity. It turns out that economics favors sustainability in the Real World™ - people will buy non-polluting technologies, and use them, if they are not prevented from so doing. Which is why the Wyoming bill that initiated this thread exists - environmentally, people pretty much have to be forced to do the wrong thing, either by coercive law, divisive propaganda, or massive market manipulation.
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You actually constructed the strawman yourself. I never said “overnight” and that is a very, very crucial difference. My whole post was about the difficulties in the decades-long process of reducing fossil fuel usage.
You see, most people when they look at the problem are just like, “oh, we just need a different source of energy”. But there are physical practical difficulties with that idea, and I’m trying to draw attention to those by saying: "OK, X is how things are now (largely gasoline and diesel powered fleet). Y is how you want things to be (everything runs on bottled sunshine). Now show me a plausible path from X to Y. (Hopefully you can see that demanding a plausible explanation for how it could happen ever is different from demanding a plausible explanation for how it could happen overnight.)
If you can bother to reformulate your arguments with that correction in mind I’ll give them a look.
(I’m more skeptical of biofuels than you are, so you might want to point to some good sources you think might convince me to be less skeptical of them.)
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That’s OK, no need for either of us to take the trouble.
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Hmm, well that’s unfortunate. I’m sincere about being skeptical for the purpose of eliciting better proposals and better ideas for how to make a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. From my perspective, you dismissed my position of skepticism based on a false premise. While I did want to correct that premise – I’m really not demanding a solution that would work overnight – I am still interested in your ideas.
It’s a little depressing to me that you’d abandon the discussion after only the smallest amount of pushback on your position. I think it’s really important to discuss the future of energy production and not let the conversation be driven by hucksters and popularizers, but people citing real scientific and engineering principles. This is about as close as it gets to a real discussion. The fact that it fizzled so quickly makes me feel pretty pessimistic about finding any solutions to our energy problems.
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Just making coal plants meet the same radioactive emissions limits as nukes would likely put them out of business.
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In principle, a bill that says “you may not generate expensive power for state residents” is sound from a cost relief perspective. I can understand that. But the bill doesn’t say that, it outlaws the use of power sources that, today are expensive, but tomorrow, may not be. It’s therefore poorly written.
It also avoids the question of “should we be producing cleaner power even though it costs more?”, which has a more complex answer than I would have thought.
I (and Boing Boing, btw!) use Bullfrog Power to supply 100% renewable generation at a slight premium to normal energy costs, however our government, whom have been pushing renewables here for years, is in serious danger of losing power in large part to the perception that power costs have been pushing renewables over affordable power generation to the point where it’s affecting low-income families. Around here gas prices and hydro prices are two things that people get disproportionally upset about when they rise.
So, where I’d have probably said “We should be paying more for renewables as part of doing the right thing” a few years ago, I’m now not so sure. Having the public make that choice for themselves when they can afford to seems a viable option if more people would accept a 5-10% increase in power bills to do so.
Hopefully, it won’t matter in the long run anyway, given how quickly renewable prices are dropping relative to conventional generation methods.
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