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Fossil Fuels Could Be Phased Out Worldwide In a Decade, Says Study (phys.org)
James Hakner, writing for Phys.org: The worldwide reliance on burning fossil fuels to create energy could be phased out in a decade, according to an article published by a major energy think tank in the UK. Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, believes that the next great energy revolution could take place in a fraction of the time of major changes in the past. But it would take a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-scalar effort to get there, he warns. And that effort must learn from the trials and tribulations from previous energy systems and technology transitions. In a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Research & Social Science, Professor Sovacool analyses energy transitions throughout history and argues that only looking towards the past can often paint an overly bleak and unnecessary picture. Moving from wood to coal in Europe, for example, took between 96 and 160 years, whereas electricity took 47 to 69 years to enter into mainstream use. But this time the future could be different, he says -- the scarcity of resources, the threat of climate change and vastly improved technological learning and innovation could greatly accelerate a global shift to a cleaner energy future.There's no doubt that we will soon reach a point wherein solar and wind will be readily available and feasible to the vast majority but, the decade timeframe feels like a stretch. We must acknowledge the financial and political challenges that we face today. Private and government-backed companies have invested billions of dollars into plants that turn fossil fuels into electricity. Ditching these plants means losing a lot of capital and owing investors with plenty of explanations. There are several forces at play here.
Things are unstable enough as it is in that territory. Matters could get a lot worse if they lose their only major source of income.
I haven't even read the study and can tell you the title conclusion is completely ridiculous, bordering on bad click-bait.There exists over 1 Billion cars in the world. Unless the governments of all countries in the world both fully subsidize AND legally mandate people to switch to electric cars AND build global infrastructure to support 1 Billion electrical cars, then it ain't gonna happen. Simple as that, end of story.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
The author of the paper, Professor Benjamin Sovacool, is Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex. Confusingly, the University also describes him as "Professor of Energy Policy (SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit)". A brief search of the University of Sussex, University of Aarhus, and Wikipedia Web sites reveals that he has published a vast number of papers, given many, many talks and seminars, published books, received grants, and has a PhD in 'science and technology studies from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he won the “Outstanding Dissertation of the Year” award from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities'.
Nowhere, however, can I find any information about Professor Sovacool's undergraduate degree discipline. From his published biographical details, he seems to have popped into existence at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University where he received his PhD - awarded, be it noted, by "the College of Social Sciences and Humanities".
Until I learn to the contrary, therefore, I am assuming that Professor Sovacool is essentially a social science specialist who has ventured - very boldly indeed - into the topical, not to say fashionable, world of climate change, global warming, and general greenness. TFA tells us that, "In a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Research & Social Science, Professor Sovacool analyses energy transitions throughout history and argues that only looking towards the past can often paint an overly bleak and unnecessary picture".
"Energy Research & Social Science". Hmmmmmmm. Professor Sovacool advances undeniably compelling (if not very scientific) arguments, such as this:
"Moving from wood to coal in Europe, for example, took between 96 and 160 years, whereas electricity took 47 to 69 years to enter into mainstream use... Ontario completed a shift away from coal between 2003 and 2014; a major household energy programme in Indonesia took just three years to move two-thirds of the population from kerosene stoves to LPG stoves; and France's nuclear power programme saw supply rocket from four per cent of the electricity supply market in 1970 to 40 per cent in 1982".
Well, there you have it. Clearly that evidence leaves no possible doubt that "[t]he worldwide reliance on burning fossil fuels to create energy could be phased out in a decade". To the satisfaction of any social science professor, anyway.
http://phys.org/news/2016-04-f...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
If renewables are cheaper, they're going to get built.
Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult - perhaps even impossible - to say what is cheaper. Government regulations and subsidies have so muddied the water that vast fortunes can now be made out of selling power that is generated less cheaply and efficently than it could be by other means.
But that is just one extreme example of how government regulation and subsidy distorts everything. It's very ironic that the governments that boast most loudly about their wonderful free-enterprise, free-market capitalist economies are the same governments that control interest rates - the fundamental price which controls all other prices. Every time a government passes a law, crates a regulation or offers a subsidy, it distorts the economy and prevents the existence of a free market.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Yes, we'll just replace EVERY car, truck, bus, motorcycle, and every other existing conveyance that uses an internal combustion engine. No PROBLEM!
That's what I thought at first too, but the paper is talking about generating electricity, not transportation.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We have have 3 major nuclear incidents in none of them have millions died. There is a lot of hype and fud, coal kills people ever year it puts more radioactive material into the air etc etc etc and has not killed us all of yet. Look at the ecological devastation of making solar panels, sure you can do it clean but dirty is cheaper.
Proliferation is an issue, newer designs deal with it pretty well, hell some designs allow for commercial production with marginally more than uranium ore.
No sir I dont like it.
Things are unstable enough as it is in that territory. Matters could get a lot worse if they lose their only major source of income.
The Middle East is unstable because of the oil wealth. Most terrorism comes from the wealthiest ME countries, not the poorest. If a government gets most of its wealth from oil, it has little need to be concerned about the welfare or aspirations of the people, other than to just keep them under control. So you get a corrupt and repressive elite, and seething resentment from the population. Saudi Arabia is the worst case, and has bred the most terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, and 15/19 of the 911 hijackers.
The recent price crash of oil was caused by a supply glut of 2 million barrels per day. According the the studies referenced here, if electric vehicle growth continues at the rate we have seen in recent years, electric vehicles will in and of themselves create their own oil demand glut of 2 million barrels by 2023. I wouldn't want to own oil stocks when that happens.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
With no income ...
what little economies they do have will collapse and that huge population of unemployed young people will go somewhere, bringing their Wahhabism with them.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
At a level of global cooperation never before achieved by the human race, on a project vastly more expensive than any project previously undertaken by any nation state (or supranational governing body) humanity could achieve X in Y years for Z dollars—where the precise value of X is pretty much irrelevant, since it surely won't happen in less than Y*3 years and Z*10 dollars, in the unlikely event it happens at all.
What Coke promised: "I'd like to teach the world to sing".
What Coke delivered: global BMI inflation & Texas-sized land yachts.
This demonstrates a POSSIBLE answer. Right now we don't think the situation is anywhere near bad enough to warrant the major problems caused by the proposed solution.
Far more likely is the complete removal of all coal plants, replaced by green technology. Combine that with a cessation of building fossil fuel burning cars, and you have a major shift.
While not as good as the possible solution from the actual post, this is a far more likely one, and would still surprise most people. The benefits would take a while to appear, but they would be real.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
[coal] is still the dominant energy source in the US
Natural gas surpasses coal for electricity generation, July 2015
Now just for a month, but coal has been declining in it's percentage.
in 2010 coal was 50%. Dropping to 30% in just 5 years? that's not a 'dominant' player, that's a dead albatross on it's way down.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Millions of elderly people die from city smog every year. Their old lungs can't take the dirty air and they get pneumonia, fluid build up, and die.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The space shuttle was considered pretty safe...until the Columbia disaster happened pointed out it's massive design flaw.
False. The space shuttle was considered quite dangerous, with a 1 in 100 chance of failure originally estimated. When you fly hundreds of missions, a mission failure was likely. It is true that later the chances were revised to even higher a higher chance, but by no means was the shuttle ever considered safe.
Peak oil is not where oil is scarce - peak oil is where there is so much oil available that we are literally drowning in oil.
We're long past peak; that's why we have to rely on [expensive] processes such as synthesizing fuels from tar sands...
What? No. Fissionable elements are only produced in appreciable amounts in supernovae, where they store only an infinitesimal fraction of the energy released, and we're pretty much stuck with the amount that was originally incorporated into the Earth's mass at conception(minus decay losses, plus the occasional tiny layer deposited by nearby supernovae). All the easily-fissionable elements in the Earth's crust (thorium, uranium, etc.) combined would provide only a few centuries to, at most, a few millenia of power at current energy consumption levels. (Uranium alone would only provide power for a few decades with current technology) After that there's no more fuel (yes, we could perhaps learn to mine the planet's molten core, as well as the rest of the solar system, but still, once used up, it's gone)
Fusion is no more renewable in principle, but there's many orders of magnitude more fusion fuel available - somewhere north of 99% of the mass of our entire solar system for starters, though somewhat dramatically less on Earth itself. Still at least a few orders of magnitude more total energy worth available planetside though.
And yes, most energy sources do ultimately originate from fusion, tidal, aka gravitational, being the exception (orbiting masses would presumably still exist even if fusion were impossible in our universe) , but the question for renewabilty is whether a power source can be depleted by usage. Biofuels, wind, or other forms of solar power cannot - the energy they harness is being released regardless of our usage rate, the only question is whether or not we choose to harness it. It's unlikely that anything we can do will have an appreciable effect on the rate of energy being consumed by our sun, at least not unless/until we discover some new laws of physics, or manage to harness an substantial fraction of its total output.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What makes the oil, gas, and coal industries possible is permitting them to ignore externalities. If you had to put the hill back to being nice after mining coal, and you had to fix all the CO2 emitted, and also somehow put all the radioactive isotopes back in the ground, and actually build refineries such that they don't occasionally^Wregularly emit deadly toxic clouds forcing evacuations (that is, build them to the same standard as chip fabs) and clean up 100% of the oil spilled and so on and so forth, none of those industries would even exist, at least not in their current forms. The oil industry would be focused on plastics, which would cost more. We'd use more composites as a result, with natural fibers perhaps. Coal just would be over. It wouldn't even be a thing. Natgas would exist, but we wouldn't be fracking, and they wouldn't be storing it in leaky underground caverns.
Permitting an industry to ignore externalities is a kind of subsidy being paid in natural capital which, in theory, belongs to all of us.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"