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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.'"
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"
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?
EVs can actually provide infrastructure, if they have enough battery. You can charge it up in town during the day (while the sun is shining) and then drive it home and use it to power your house.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
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.
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."
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.