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The World's Astonishing Dependence On Fossil Fuels Hasn't Changed In 40 Years (qz.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Quartz, adding: "Maybe 'dependence' is a poor description of poor people using the ready availability of cheap energy to help lift themselves out of poverty": There are few ways to understand why. First, most of the world's clean-energy sources are used to generate electricity. But electricity forms only 25% of the world's energy consumption. Second, as the rich world moved towards a cleaner energy mix, much of the poor world was just starting to gain access to modern forms of energy. Inevitably, they chose the cheapest option, which was and remains fossil fuels. So yes, we're using much more clean energy than we used to. But the world's energy demand has grown so steeply that we're also using a lot more fossil fuels than in the past.
The headline is false, of course. There is still a dependence, but "unchanged in 40 years" is bullshit.
I recently saw a documentary by the British Coal Board, made in late sixties or so. Their economist went on to explain that the difference between "this" (pictures of Western developed industry manufacturing big things like ships) and "that" (pictures of developing world poor, surviving by making stuff with their bare hands) was ENERGY, and LOTS OF IT.
Then they went on to explain that although nuclear had a lot of promise, it wasn't here yet, for various reasons they did not appear to want to dwell on, and that therefore coal would remain the heart of industry.
I now nobody likes nuclear, and nobody likes consumerism, and we all want a quiet life in the countryside, until we need a hospital and emergency chopper ride, but essentially, there seems to be only one choice, between two kinds of energy:
1. coal, oil, gas, wind, solar
2. nuclear
And the world keeps often choosing option 1.
Which must be to the delight of all those vested interests in the oil and gas (and somewhat lesser extent coal) industries.
I doubt that. Can anyone provide numbers?
It's definitely cheapest if you ignore the cost of the damage done, because it requires less infrastructure than anything else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A quick look at the graph in The Fine Article shows that indeed "fossil" looks flat; probably because in the late 70s and 80s nuclear was coming on-stream and hydrocarbon usage started to dip. Of course, the oil crisis helped. But then China exploded economically so hey - coal and gas came back up %age-wise. These days of course, "renewables" (why do I hate that term so much? The sun is not magically "renewing itself; it's literally burning to death...), anyway, solar & wind etc. are picking up where nuclear left off. The fact is that the cheapness, convenience and energy-density of hydrocarbons can't be beat in most situations in developing nations.
only number that matter to consumer, is the price directly paid by consumer.
every other number is selected subjectively, thus open to interpretation.
"lies, dammed lies and statistics"
Some of the African countries are turning to the renewables first, skipping fossil fuels for electricity entirely. So that's gotta be at least one positive.
Unfortunately, that's not really addressing transportation fuel consumption, which is the daddy of fossil fuel use.
Just really frickin hard to argue with the utility and bang for your buck when it comes to hydrocarbon based liquid and gas fuels. They're just freakin awesome.
Electric cars are nice and all, but they do require a supporting grid to recharge from. They're going to help in developed countries for sure. But will that offset the growth in poorer countries that just don't have the infrastructure?
When you figure the balance sheet at the end of the year, if we're still putting a lot of CO2 into the atmo, we got serious problems inbound. I mean, humans will adapt, but it's not going to be pretty.
there are a few (very) interesting speeches on youtube from Vaclav Smil where he explains that energy transitions (wood to fossil fuel, fossil fuel to solar )are a slow process, completely contrary to the speed of innovation. For instance here https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's no 'law of energy transitions' forbidding fast transitions, but it's very hard and it's worth understanding why it's hard.
Why has demand increased while global energy efficiency has also increased?
population increased!
Why do people tiptoe around the true cause like it's taboo or something?
Did you *read* any of that before you linked to it? Did you pay any attention to WHO was making those ridiculous claims? Don't tell me you read Kevin Steinberger's claims like 40% of Texas energy production is wind and actually *believed* that. Try 3%. Texas DOES produce more wind energy than any other state, but it's a tiny fraction of what we produce. When it's hot, and therefore not windy, we average only about 6 megawatts - the same days we need our air conditioning.
If you click on the About Us page there on the NRDC web site you'll see how they describe themselves:
Even by environmentalist standards, this is a relentless group
Like the National Inquirer, they fail to explicitly state "this is satire and shouldn't be confused with anything real". The Onion is a better source in that respect.
The demand for oil in China has decreased, and now the price of an oil barrel is around US$ 50. Everyone now is talking about "peak demand": oil consumption in OECD countries is almost flat for the last ten years, and the major source of growth comes from China.
Oil consumption is on the highest levels of human history, but with little change for the last decade. Meanwhile, the potential of growth of an important renewable source became scarce for the last couple decades: hydropower. It will take some time for us to actually see a decrease on consumption of oil and coal, as other renewables increase their share on the world energy consumption.
When you think about just how much energy it takes to simply feed 7+ billion people and then the portable energy density in fossil fuels, there should be no astonishment.
I wish storage we're in any way feasible for a significant portion of our energy needs. Unfortunately, any storage we can come up with is orders of magnitude too small. We use 11 TRILLION btu of energy every year. There's nothing can come anywhere close to storing enough power to make it through those weeks when a couple of large cloud systems cover half the country, drastically reducing solar output.
I'm trying to come up with a good analogy to give you a sense of scale, but it's difficult. I can tell you that all of our current storage can store less than 1% of what we produce, and the clean energy we produce is less than 10% of our energy needs. It's like saying "water can be stored in Dixie cups" and then supposing that we can store the nations water supply in Dixie cups. You can picture the hundreds of paper cups it would take to store water for just one shower - energy storage is like that.
Let's take one proposal as an example, hydro storage. Hydro is handy where you happen to have a just the right geography, such as at Hoover dam. The thing is, you need a LOT of water pumped high to hold a little bit of energy. To match the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline, we would have to lift 13 tons of water (3500 gallons) one kilometer high (3,280 feet). Hoover Dam, holding back 147 square miles of water, can store about 1/3,000 of the needed energy. Unfortunately, we don't have 3,000 locations as good as Hoover dam. Given actual US geography, we'd need the reservoir to be the entire area between the Rocky Mountains on the West and the Appalachians on the East. Our hydro reservoir would completely flood 17 states and portions of 5 other states. We'd have a huge dam across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Building that dam would itself require approximately as much energy as the country produces in a year.
You can do the math for lipo and other types of storage. Sure, you can store a week of energy for a remote hunting cabin,if the cabin doesn't have air conditioning or any tools or anything that requires more power than lighting does. The US has 325 MILLION people, though. Energy storage per person, adequate to supply AC, transportation, etc, will take up about as much space as their living space, and cost at least as much (unless it's stored as hydrocarbons, an incredibly dense form of storage). So you can picture for every residential neighborhood, you'd need an equally-sized neighborhood of energy storage units. Your rent or mortgage is very roughly about equal to what your energy storage bill would be.
We should compare things like micro-hydro power with fossil fuels.
Compare them for what? Subsistence living? Small scale hydro is a Good Thing but for most people it's hardly going to be enough to meaningfully displace fossil fuels except as a very small part of a larger energy portfolio. Solar and wind are far more practical in most circumstances, even for local generation. I couldn't use micro-hydro anywhere close to my house because it's so geographically dependent and it's not an option at all for almost anyone not living in a fairly remote area.
Fossil fuels put the poor at the mercy of global markets, disappearing and becoming more expensive every time there is a war or the wrong kind of financial crisis.
No reasonably foreseeable amount of small scale local power generation is going to change that fact. Even if I put enough renewable energy into my house to power all my needs (including an EV), that still won't affect the impact on of fluctuating energy costs on manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. Modern agriculture is basically the process of turning diesel fuel into food and nearly all our transport systems are tied to fossil fuels currently. What needs to be emphasized is that we need a diverse portfolio of energy sources to mitigate economic disruptions from geopolitics. An important part of this will be local generation (solar roofs, etc) but we'll also need technologies for transport that aren't tied to fossil fuels (EVs) and for fossil fuels to actually have to bear the full cost of the pollution they generate.
And yes you are quite right about one use plastics. That's a much bigger problem than most people realize.
When there is a technology that is superior that doesn't require fossil fuels, this will change. Chop chop scientists!
We'll make great pets
As wealthy countries have shifted away from fossil fuels, the poorest countries have moved from no energy usage to industrial use of fossil fuels. It's like a..well, a pipeline.
A lot of that was due to market forces pushing coal out and natural gas in as a fuel of choice. So thereâ(TM)s no evidence a tax would change things
These two are contradictory. Fossil fuels were phased out because they were not price-competitive with the alternatives. A tax that made them even less price competitive would therefore be expected to increase the rate and degree to which they were phased out.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
People use coal, gas and oil because they deliver more power for the money than alternatives in many applications. We'll switch when the cost curves cross, the same way we shifted from wood to coal.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
These headlines are an easy way to be confident that the article is a complete waste of time. Which raises the question about Slashdot...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If greenhouse gas emissions are indeed a global problem, why do developing countries get a pass on emission limits? Because they're poor? Gotta do better than that.
Those are very much the exception rather than the rule; wood stands up to hot/cold cycles and UV rays far better than plastic, is more comfortable to grip than plastic (especially in extreme temps) and doesn't off-gas a cocktail of cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting vapors.
Plastic isn't a single chemical. There are all sorts of plastics with all sorts of properties. For particular applications many of them easily outperform wood. Wood can be a fine thing to use too but to pretend that it outperforms plastic as a general proposition without specifying the application is simply willful ignorance or confirmation bias.
Prices need to come down for things like EVs, Wind, Solar, Nuclear, etc. And that is the case.
Interestingly, Elon Musk is driving this more than any single nation, business, or person. Kind of sad, and yet, in the future, he will be regarded as a true hero for this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.