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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 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.'"
And recently I am hearing news that "gas" is a fossil fuel which should be phased out.
Correct. In fact, we should probably phase it out before coal and oil, because the production levels we're seeing now are predicated upon fracking, which compromises the planet's clean water supply in the future for energy company profits in the present.
Guess what? We don't need that gas either if we just keep putting more storage online.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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 oil and coal industry hold significant patents on the devices that make competing energy systems viable.
Interesting. Do you have some of these patent numbers ?
Sure, US4009052,US3791867, US3972759, though I think it will be easier for you to start working your way through the Energy act I posted and you'll get an idea how the oil industry works.
IIRC around sec 625 is where the funding is allocated to destroy the only demonstrated viable functioning prototype of the Integral Fast Reactor, a Fast Neutron Nuclear Reactor, high burn up rate (almost 20%) with a design that encapsulated a self contained fuel reprocessing facility, that produces electricity (obsoleting coal) and hydrogen (obsoleting oil - whilst maintaining existing vehicle fleets), producing medical isotopes, whilst burning through the stocks of enough weapons grade plutonium and Depleted uranium to power the US for the next 5000 years. Your tax dollars at work.
I think it's important to consider if Oil and Coal would be motivated to maintain their multi-trilllion dollar profits and capable of doing this than greenies and NIMBYs that are so often accused. It's time for that stupid premise to be put aside with the naivety that allows it to be believed. Greenies and NIMBYs didn't argue for billions of dollars of subsidies to maintain oil industry profits and I think it's safe to say that a nuclear reactor that promotes nuclear disarmament is in everybody's interest. The US could export these reactors to Russia, China even North Korea and end global conflict within 5 years whilst solving the global nuclear waste issue, but oil.
The only loser would have been oil and coal. You think they're going to give up trillions of dollars? No, they're gonna start lobbying, it's cheaper. Repealing the "New Deal PUCHA (Act)" that was put in place to prevent a repeat of the 1929 depression in the bargain so they can rort half billion dollar subsidy hits on delayed conventional nuclear facility construction, whilst claiming input tax credits. That's the reality of energy funding policy, that's how the scam works.
Look for yourself, it's US law, enacted.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.